-
What do we see in reading? It might seem that "see"
is a murky word, one whose conflation of sensory
perception with cognition makes it a poor lens for the
inspection of either. This suggestion, common in the
last twenty years' work on lyric, takes its cue from
Paul de Man's emphasis on the discontinuity of
phenomenal and cognitive processes. In "Phenomenality
and Materiality in Kant," de Man finds that in the
Third Critique Kant needs "a phenomenalized,
empirically manifest principle of cognition on whose
existence the possibility of . . . an articulation
[between conceptual and empirical realms of discourse]
depends,"1
but instead registers "a deep, perhaps fatal, break or
discontinuity" between "language as a performative as
well as a cognitive system" and "the powers of
transcendental philosophy" (AI 79). This
discontinuity "becomes apparent in the text"
(AI 79) as what de Man calls "a
material vision," "purely material, devoid of
any reflexive or intellectual complication"
(AI 82, 83). De Man goes on to propose that
the "equivalence . . . in the order of language" of
Kant's material vision is "the prosaic materiality of
the letter" (AI 90, 89). For Kant's purposes,
then, "a material vision" is the very opposite of the
"phenomenalized, empirically manifest principle of
cognition" that the aesthetic was supposed to provide;
material vision is the Dantean hell that de Man writes
for Kant as a parody of his desire for "phenomenal
cognition." "No degree of obfuscation or ideology," de
Man writes, "can transform this materiality into the
phenomenal cognition of aesthetic judgment"
(AI 90). In tracing the possible impacts of de
Man's remarks on material vision, then, we might begin
by remembering that for de Man, the foundering of
Kant's transcendental system in material vision is a
failure of redemption, the failure of materiality to
"transform." As such, material vision is the
manifestation in de Man's late work of his lifelong
analysis of renunciation.2
The anticlimactic sinewave of which de Man's notion of
materiality is part is tonal evidence for how de Man
reception might interpret it: the message of the larger
narrative is that we are (only) what we are, that the
world is what it is—which is not to say that we
know what it is.
-
De Man distinguishes a linguistic function from
"perception" in another way in "Resistance to Theory."
Here de Man stipulates that "linguistic
terminology"—the terminology of "literary
theory"—"considers reference as a function of
language and not necessarily as an intuition. Intuition
implies perception, consciousness, experience, and
leads at once into the world of logic and of
understanding with all its correlatives, among which
aesthetics occupies a prominent place."3
De Man is doing a lot, probably too much, in this
single sentence. He disarticulates linguistic
functioning from all other faculties conceived as a
network. Reference is not only "not necessarily . . .
an intuition" or perception, but not necessarily part
of the "world of logic and of understanding" either, if
that world is construed as a complete set of
"correlatives." In this context the discontinuity
between seeing and reading would be typical of the
always possibly contingent relations between kinds of
mental acts.
-
The contrast between kinds of mental acts, however,
is not as stark as it might at first seem. The objects
of seeing are perceptual and intuitive; the products of
linguistic functions are "not necessarily" so. By de
Man's own logic, his carefulness is not a direction to
purge the word "seeing" from literary
theory.4
The aesthetic concept of the phenomenalization of
thought is not the only possible meaning of the word
"seeing"; still less is it what seeing actually is.The
word "seeing," in all its ambiguity, is split
between perceptual and cognitive, literal and
figurative, meanings, and only our own interpretation
can unify and hence aestheticize it. In itself, I'll
suggest, it represents what we know—and don't
know—of perception and cognition more accurately
than "perception" and "cognition" do, while the attempt
to use "seeing" narrowly, over and against "reading,"
tends to entangle itself in aesthetics. Not that there
is, after all, a passageway between perception and
cognition. Rather, in coming to the place where such a
passageway is needed and missing, we find ourselves in
a difficulty for which "seeing" can be a rather honest
figure, one that does not necessarily resemble
aesthetic ideology's appropriation of it.5
-
If we take de Man's readings of Kant seriously, then
after our discovery of aesthetic ideology we are called
upon to go beyond transcendental philosophy's elements.
Beyond, and not simply back to empiricism: de Man
leaves us with a materialism "more radical" than that
of empiricism (AI 121) in that it is found
even at the heart of form. Although it is compatible
with an unredemptive formalism, however, this
materialism should not be made to serve
retranscendentalizing operations. Frances Ferguson
criticizes de Man for putting the mind in the position
of always needing to start over, and compares him to
Adorno in this respect.6
She is right, and that's one thing for which we may
value de Man: the position to which de Man returns us
(from which, he reveals, we have never yet actually
budged) is the de facto condition of epistemology, and
a cause for neither celebration nor disappointment.
From Blindness and Insight on de Man presents
this reality of our epistemological circumstances
steadily and urbanely, without ascending into hysteria
or theology. I worry that the current direction of the
reception of de Man's ideas about materiality, in
contrast, invents a new, philosophically reactionary
transcendentalism that erodes de Man's legacy, or at
least the attitude of resilient skepticism that is part
of what I would like de Man's legacy to be.
I.
-
For the editors introducing Material Events:
Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory (2001),
the constellation of ideas around "materiality"
inspires the project of an alternative to the Third
Critique, one that seems not to give up on
transcendentalism but to reformulate it. They see
opportunities in the a priori. "Whatever
inscription designates, it conjures sheer
anteriority," they suggest; "it does not deliver us to
any immediacy of reference, [or] to any historical
narrative that presumes to encode such, but to mnemonic
programs that appear to precede and legislate these"
(viii).7
De Man's work is called "the portal for a wide-ranging
interrogation into how 'the event' operates in history,
and what intervention in the order of inscription
entails" (xii-xiii). "Intervention" is depicted as the
storming and occupation of the imperial palace of
faculties:
By way of de Man's late work on "materiality" a
project emerges that relates less to a "seventies"
venture in theory than to still future and proactive
investigations of and interventions in the
hypertextual relay systems and programs out of which
the "human" (and nonhuman) appears constituted,
temporalization produced and managed, the "sensorium"
altered, the virtuality of the present and the
technicity of inscription brought to a point of
passage or crossing. (xiii)
Editors Cohen, Cohen, and Miller remodel the
infrastructure of the Third Critique. De Man appears as
an "engineer" who approaches "the archive, the
prerecordings out of which experience is projected and
semantic economies policed" (ix). CCM cite the career
of Benjamin as another example of arche-engineering on
the production lot of phenomenality, "where this
trajectory finds an ultimate articulation as a radical
(re)programming of the (historial) archive out of which
the sensorium' would be alternatively produced" (x).
Still, "experience is projected," and "the sensorium' .
. . produced," out of the engineer's workplace.
Engineering has a polemical meaning in the history of
literary theory; this engineer seems to be the
short-circuiter of structuralism's empiricist base. If
Levi-Strauss is the anti-engineer of inductive reason,
assembling significance from observable surfaces, in
Material Events the engineer enters the studio
at night and with a few keystrokes changes what is
projected on the screen—the blockbuster known as
SensoriumRedux. That the archive, and
the source code, are external, and that there is no way
to infer archive from screen, does not dilute the
strictly transcendental nature of the fantasy.
-
Is de Man's work a "portal" to this
project?8
There is fascination with the a priori in de Man, but
there is irony toward it, too. Arguably, his work on
"reference prior to designating the referent"
(RT 8) and the "autonomous potential of
language" (RT 10) show such an ambivalent
fascination. In "Kant and Schiller" de Man speaks of
"the historicity a priori" of the textual event
(AI 133); the ever-expanding motion of the
unfolding textual event is pursued to a logical extreme
in "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant" (AI
77-79). Part of de Man's point, however, is that this
is not a wave that can be caught. His vision of "the
saturation of the tropological field as language frees
itself of its constraints" (AI 79) adapts the
problem of plenitude in Neoplatonic metaphysics that he
considers in his early work: the infinite generativity
that would seem to be required of an infinitely
powerful being ends in the existence of
everything—a blow to unity and value whose
damage, according to Lovejoy, the "great chain of
being" is inadequate to repair.9
In his early "Criticism and the Theme of Faust," de Man
condenses quotations from Lovejoy to conclude that
"rationality, when conceived as complete, including all
arbitrariness, becomes itself a kind of
irrationality....The world of concrete existence...is
no impartial transcript of the realm of essence....It
is, in short, a contingent world.'"10
De Man's narrative here discovers materiality at the
end of power as the anticlimax of an investigation into
the a priori.
-
Similarly, a strongly "critical"-sounding passage of
"Resistance to Theory" defines "literary theory" by its
movement from "meaning" and "value" to "the modalities
of production and of reception of meaning and of value
prior to their establishment" (RT 7). Thus
semiotics is, at least in principle, a more theoretical
discourse than interpretation. De Man's conclusion,
though, is that for the very reason that the logical
conclusion of semiotics (for example, in Greimas) is a
transcendental system applicable "to the generation of
all texts," it rejoins the aesthetic project
(RT 14). Only "reading," rather than any
properly critical—in linguistic terms,
grammatical—investigation, is "a negative process
in which the grammatical cognition is undone"
(RT 17). Literary theory has no exemption from
aestheticization by virtue of its theoretical or
specifically literary nature: that literary theory
shifts to "modalities of production and of reception of
meaning and value" makes it theoretical, but
this is not necessarily a compliment to literary
theory. Rather, it shows that literary theory remains
susceptible to aesthetic ideology. Passages like this
one should qualify the claim that the enterprise of
"proactive investigations" into the general operation
or generation of textual events "emerges" from the late
de Man with his imprimatur. Still less does de Man
write about intervening in or reprogramming mnemonic
structures and the sensorium. Not only does he not
mention the possibility of intervention in mnemonic and
sensory structures; it's hard to reconcile such a
possibility with his assertion that the linguistic
structure that, he finds, disarticulates the Third
Critique, cannot be mobilized by any drive (AI
147).11
-
The notion of the sensorium as film studio (in the
head or in the world), replete with engineers, set
designers, directors, and projectionists, is one of
western metaphysics' favorite motifs—the fantasy
production lot of the aesthetic project. In this case
politically progressive, it is in any case
philosophically regressive. I do not find this motif
advocated in de Man, and it can be found in the most
undeManian places—in the startlingly strange
perceptual literalism of Elaine Scarry, for example.
Scarry takes the position opposite to contemporary
deconstruction on "seeing" and "reading": she believes
that in reading we "see" mental images that surpass the
vivacity of nonliterary imagining, images that "somehow
. . . acquire the vivacity of perceptual objects" (5).
(As she notes, many philosophers and cognitive
psychologists don't think "mental images" exist, but
some do, and she does [258-259n6].) The verbal
arts "displac[e] the ordinary attributes of imagining,"
Scarry asserts in Dreaming by the Book,
—its faintness, two-dimensionality,
fleetingness, and dependence on volitional
labor—with the vivacity, solidity, persistence,
and givenness of the perceptible world . . . . this
comes about because we are given procedures for
reproducing the deep structure of perception, and
because the procedures themselves have an
instructional character that duplicates the
"givenness" of perception. (38)
In another passage from Dreaming By the
Book, "imaginary vivacity comes about by
reproducing the deep structure of perception . . . .
what in perception comes to be imitated is not only the
sensory outcome (the way something looks or sounds or
feels beneath the hands) but the actual structure of
production that gave rise to the perception; that is,
the material conditions that made it look, sound, or
feel the way it did" (9). In approximating the material
conditions of perception, texts make readers feel as
though they are having particular perceptions and not
just material visions of letters. This feeling is what
Scarry calls seeing a mental image.
-
In "Kant and Schiller," de Man shows how Schiller's
sublime forms a symmetrical set of chiasmi that allows
for safe travel in the universe. Scarry is
extravagantly Schillerian in her attachment to
imitation as play and in her equanimious, symmetrical
transfers;12
flowers (and other small diaphanous things) are her
ultimate imaginable objects because they already
resemble mental images—they are the entry points
to her aesthetic Paradiso. Scarry even cites
Schiller's Aesthetic Education as an authority
on this point: Schiller, she notes, "places the flower
in the space of passage between material and
immaterial," contributing to the "explanation of the
easily imagined as something that can enter the mind
precisely because it is always already in a state of
passage from the material to the dematerialized"
(63).
-
What does Scarry's apparatus have in common with
Cohen, Cohen and Miller's? Surprisingly much,
considering their contrary critical lineages and
ideological aims. Scarry, too, pursues the post-Kantian
project of securing the prosaic conditions, or "actual
structures," of what she believes to be the sensory
effects of reading. Moving from an investigation of
textual effects to the conditions of possibility of the
sensorium, her argument recalls eighteenth century
arguments from the very existence of multiple senses to
a supersense that supports them. For her, the fact that
"verbal art, especially narrative, is almost bereft of
any sensuous content" (5) only suggests an alternate,
subterranean route to sensuous content—"miming
the deep structure that brings the sensation about"
(256n6). While she does not believe that we
can alter the structure itself, she does believe that
we can manipulate it for our own ends. Primary among
the methods that Scarry claims enable such mimesis are
the suppression of the sense of volition—the
imaginer likes being given "direction" by someone, as
this makes the content seem "given," therefore
real—and a "sequence of coherent steps for
constructing the image" (20). Scarry, too, is a
programmer. Imagining under authorial direction is more
than a way of being open to a mere illusion of
sensation. Her version of mimesis is strong enough for
virtual worldmaking: it is a repeatable method for
stimulating in the body an image that responds to the
content of a particular idea. If the methods are
sleights of hand, they are sleights that provoke
physiological responses and specifiable perceptions.
For her, the fact that texts have their own sensory
properties as ink shapes on paper does not interfere
with their power to evoke images related to their
semantic content. Rather, the sensory fact of their
materiality rubs off on the mental images the words
conjure, much as the ongoing sensory experiences of the
dreaming body may contribute to the reality effects of
dream content.13
Like Cohen, Cohen, and Miller, Scarry organizes her
work through cinematic metaphors, down to two of her
section titles, "Making Pictures" and "Moving
Pictures." For the utterly nondeManian, indeed
aesthetically ideological Scarry, then, language is
again "material production" that elicits a "perceptual
outcome" (20) in a "projective space" (14).
II.
-
De Man, in contrast, reads Kant partly in order to
give an account of a relatively straightforward attempt
at aesthetics, one that does not conceal its limits. In
"Kant and Schiller," de Man both points out how
Schiller edits Kant's troubled Third Critique into a
system that raises fewer questions, and admires Kant
for his relative inability to paper over its problems.
Just after having discussed Schiller's channeling of
the "organic, sensory," "chaotic," and "concrete"
elements of discourse into a symmetrical exchange with
order and system, de Man writes:
Here, the comparison to make with Kant is with Kant's
statements about figuration, about what he
calls hypotyposis, which is the
difficulty [my italics—RT] of rendering,
by means of sensory elements, purely intellectual
concepts. And the particular necessity which
philosophy has, to take its terminology not from
purely intellectual concepts but from material,
sensory elements, which it then uses metaphorically
and frequently forgets that it does so . . . . At any
rate, hypotyposis for Kant is certainly a problem for
understanding, and a very difficult problem that
again threatens philosophical discourse; whereas here
it is offered by Schiller as a solution,
again in the form of a chiasmus, for a similar
opposition. (AI 153)
What Schiller offers as a solution, Kant, to his
credit, sees as "the difficulty," which he calls
hypotyposis. The thinking of hypotyposis, then, could
be a model for the realization of aesthetics' limits
and the self-critical registration of this
realization.
-
Literally, hypotyposis is a sketch, an outline, thus
"form" with an emphasis on the emptiness, as Rodolphe
Gasché observes (207). The rhetorical tradition
uses this spatial figure of outline as an analogy for
crisp verbal description. Hypotyposis is "clear
explanation and almost visual presentation of
events as if practically going on," writes
Cicero (quoted in Gasché 207). The only thing
that becomes clear in such definitions is that
hypotyposis is as thin referentially as a term of art
could be. The invocation of hypotyposis implies exactly
nothing about how hypotyposis gets done. Nor do we even
know exactly what its effects are, for hypotyposis is a
figure whose effects are themselves described
figuratively, with an "as if." In that way, it's close
to what I mean by "seeing" and, as I'll explain later,
what de Man means by "materiality." These are
placeholders in language for something we do not know
anything about, even whether it actually exists or
not.
-
In §59 of the Third Critique, "On Beauty as the
Symbol of Morality," Kant glosses "hypotyposis" as
"exhibition [Darstellung], subiectio ad
adspectum." He also specifies what hypotyposes are
not: "mere characterizations, i.e.
designations of concepts by accompanying sensible signs
[bloße Charakterismen, d.i. Bezeichnungen der
Begriffe durch begleitende sinnliche Zeichen]" such as
"words, or visible (algebraic or even mimetic) signs
[Worte, oder sichtbare (algebraische, selbst mimische)
Zeichen]." Hypotyposes have intuitive content: they are
schemata or symbols. A schema, in turn, is what
mediates the assimilation of intuitions by concepts of
understanding. And what is a schema? It's a rule. So
far, the analysis of hypotyposis simply gives
exhibition in general, as opposed to description, but
explains what counts as exhibition only circularly.
—What kind of a rule is a schema? Well,
it is, for example, the rule that effects must follow
causes in time, or the rule that substance has to have
duration. Schemata are the rules of the classical
natural world: if concepts are linked to intuitions
through schemata, they're linked through their common
fitness for that world. (A schematic hypotyposis might
be, for example, a Euclidean proof.) So we can now say
about hypotyposes that when they are schematic, they
are natural, that is, they are plunged in space and
time and in the natural world. But hypotyposes—I
return now to §59—can also be symbolic:
Symbolic exhibition uses an analogy . . . in which
judgment performs a double function: first it applies
the concept to the object of a sensible intuition;
and then it applies the mere rule by which it
reflects on that intuition to an entirely different
object, of which the formal object is only a symbol.
Thus a monarchy ruled according to its own
constitutional laws would be presented as an animate
body, but a monarchy ruled by an individual absolute
will would be presented as a mere machine (such as a
hand mill); but in either case the presentation is
only symbolic. For though there is no
similarity between a despotic state and a hand mill,
there certainly is one between the rules by which we
reflect on the two and on how they operate. This
function has not been analyzed much so far, even
though it very much deserves fuller investigation;
but this is not the place to pursue it. Our language
is replete with such indirect exhibitions according
to an analogy, where the expression does not contain
the actual schema for the concept but contains merely
a symbol for our reflection. Thus the words
foundation (support, basis), to
depend (to be held from above), to
flow (instead of to follow) from something,
substance (the support of accidents, as
Locke puts it), and countless others are not
schematic but symbolic hypotyposes; they express
concepts not by means of a direct intuition but only
according to an analogy with one, i.e., a transfer of
our reflection on an object of intuition to an
entirely different concept, to which perhaps no
intuition can ever directly correspond.
[einer Analogie . . . in welcher die Urtheilskraft
ein doppeltes Geschäft verrichtet, erstlich den
Begriff auf den Gegenstand einer sinnlichen
Anschauung[,] und dann zweitens die bloße Regel
der Reflexion über jene Anschauung auf einen
ganz andern Gegenstand, von dem der erstere nur das
Symbol ist, anzuwenden. So wird ein monarchischer
Staat durch einen beseelten Körper, wenn er nach
inneren Volksgesetzen, durch eine bloße
Maschine aber, (wie etwa eine Handmühle) wenn er
durch einen einzelnen absoluten Willen beherrscht
wird, in beiden Fällen aber nur symbolisch
vorgestellt. Denn, zwischen einem despotischen Staate
und einer Handmühle ist zwar keine Unlichkeit,
wohl aber zwischen der Regel über beide und ihre
Causalität zu reflectiren. Dies Geschäft
ist bis jetzt noch wenig auseinandergesetzt worden,
so sehr es auch eine tiefere Untersuchung verdient;
allein hier ist nicht der Ort sich dabei aufzuhalten.
Unsere Sprache ist voll von dergleichen indirecten
Darstellungen, nach einer Analogie, wodurch der
Unsbruck nicht das eigentliche Schema für den
Begriff, sondern bloß ein Symbol für die
Reflexion enthält. So sind die Wörter Grund
(Stütze, Basis), Abhängen (von oben
gehalten werden), woraus fließen (statt
folgen), Substanz (wie Locke sich ausdrückt: der
Träger der Accidenzen) [,] und unzählige
andere nicht schematische, sondern symbolische
Hypotyposen[,] und Ausdrücke fürBegriffe
nicht vermittelst einer directen Anschauung, sondern
nur nach einer Analogie mit derselben, d.i. der
Übertragung der Reflexion über einen
Gegenstand der Anschauung auf einen ganz andern
Begriff, dem vielleicht nie eine Anschauung direct
correspondiren kann.]
Kant's examples of the equally symbolic corporeal
and machinic presentations of monarchy might be said to
reveal that symbolic hypotyposis all too conveniently
imports qualities from the presentable to the
unpresentable through the lie of poetry. The question
arises why, in that case, Kant thinks symbolic
hypotyposis is hypotyposis at all. What it is about the
symbolic that merits comparison to the schematic, and
makes it a kind of intuitive presentation? A monarchy,
an animate body, and a "handmill"—whatever that
is—are unlike; a monarchy is not an entity whose
properties are completely definable. While it's fair to
say that a monarchy must be answerable to the laws of
physics, it's also fair to say that we don't know
exactly how, because "the monarchy" itself is an
approximation—if not an opaque name, then one
that is dark around the edges. If someone tells us that
it is at least an organization of bodies, however, then
when we imagine its workings, we do so by using our
concepts of other organizations of bodies. We don't
have to know or be able to know what a tyranny is in
order to be able to understand if someone tells us
(wrongly or rightly) that, like a pepper grinder, it is
operated by a single will.14
The hypotyposis indicates the schema to which disparate
concepts are connected as an otherwise unpresentable
cause is to its effects. Kant's text even illustrates
hypotyposis by hypotyposis: His verbal comparison
between the comparison between tyrannies and pepper
grinders, on one hand, and symbolic and schematic
hypotyposes, on the other, shows by symbolic
hypotyposis how symbols and schemata are both
hypotyposes. The proof concerning demonstration is not
demonstrated directly: discourse and method occur
together, method being talked about in
discourse.15
My point is not that therefore, all is discourse;
rather, this is the end of the line, and whatever
conclusion one draws will be partly a matter of
attitude. In this place, repeatedly, the philosophy of
language takes a leap of faith, and claims to plug into
natural science: it bids to become a natural science of
language, grounded in necessity, as in Descartes,
Russell, early Wittgenstein, or Chomsky. This is the
place where philosophers start saying, with regard to
analogy, that it really seems.16
-
One's degree of faith in the reality of analogy is
not so much an interpretation as a decision.
Hypotyposis, or any construct that serves its
placeholding function, is a black box. For de Man, I
would suggest, such a construct is not a solution but a
"difficulty of rendering." We do not know what is
there, or whether anything is there that is not a mere
artifact of the terms of the problem; we do not know
what real seeming consists in, or whether it consists
in anything. We can only agree with Kant that
if it is somewhere, there is where it
should go.
-
Now, Derrida argues in "Typewriter Ribbon" that
"materiality" is, like hypotyposis, a word to put down
when one can go no further. In "Phenomenality and
Materiality in Kant," de Man casts his characterization
of Kant's description of the ocean as a catachretic act
of nomination: "the only word that comes to mind is
that of a material vision" (AI 82).
In "Kant and Schiller" de Man again struggles to
nominate "something [properly unnameable—RT]
which one could call a progression—though it
shouldn't be—a movement, from cognition, from
acts of knowledge, from states of cognition, to
something [again—RT] which is no longer a
cognition but which is to some extent an
occurrence, which has the materiality of
something that actually happens" (AI 132).
Noting de Man's appeals "to what he himself says he
calls text'" (TR 336) and "what is
called materialism'" (AI 128, quoted in
TR 350), Derrida proposes that "materiality"
for de Man is whatever fills "the place of prosaic
resistance" (TR 350), "a very useful generic
name for all that resists appropriation"(TR
353), or, going even further, "the name, the
artifactual nomination of an artifactual figure . . . .
a sort of invention by de Man, one could say, almost a
fiction produced in the movement of a strategy"
(TR 352-353). In this case the materiality of
language is de Man's X at the spot where aesthetics
cannot be completed.
-
Various philosophical choices may then be made. The
resort to algebra—"here is where
something should go"—leads to a
literature in which indexicals and names are the
foundations of knowledge: a new metaphysics,
potentially, or a deconstructive
nominalism.17
It also opens the way to negative theology, a
recentering of metaphysics on the void (the path of
Lacan and Zizek). Cohen, Cohen, and Miller continue to
treat materiality as part of a realm "out of which
experience is projected." They take their difference
from Kant to mean that experience would be projected
differently, and in this sense, seem to go on
as though the transcendental system could be made to
work to new ends. De Man's conclusion at the end of
"Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant" is that the
loss of "the architectonic unity of the system . . .
marks the undoing of the aesthetic as a valid category"
and "undoes the very project of such a philosophy"
(AI 89). A forward-thinking literary theory, I
would suggest, would not read in this conclusion the
possibility of something like a transcendental
philosophy persisting but no longer being predictable
or unified,18
or persisting in ruins whose debris could be taken up
and used for other purposes, or turned against itself,
not least because one cannot turn against itself a
machinery whose very existence is dubious. Rather,
because Kant leaves a question mark at the most
important place in his system, the transcendental
philosophy will not have been something so substantial
as to have produced debris. It will have been a plan
for a system that never got finished. One can keep
trying to revise and finish it, but that makes sense
only if you wish it worked. If you are relieved that it
doesn't work, the issue is still open, but for the
moment, it makes more sense to say: So much for
that. That way lies a renewed empiricism, not
eighteenth-century empiricism, but a radical empiricism
strong enough to encompass formalism.19
-
The attraction of the Cohen-Cohen-Miller model is
its speculative liberation theology:
We will take the position for the sake of argument
and because it is interesting to consider, that what
remains unengaged in de Man's text addresses the
possibility of intervention in the mnemonic, the
programming of the "historial," and a treatment of
"materiality" that compels a rethinking of technicity
and the "sensorium" on the basis of inscription.
Among other things it would be an approach, given the
"materiality of inscription," to the notion of the
"virtual" and toward a rendering virtual—and
hence, toward alternative histories to those
programmed by inherited regimes of definition and
perception (viii).
The desire of this position lies in its ambition to
reach into the structures that produce history
and the sensorium, thereby arriving at a means of
generating histories and sensoria, potentially for
all. Changing the past is a crucial
revolutionary desire for which Benjamin is a very good
keynote. I do not mean to derogate it in the slightest
by suggesting that it has been given most serious
expression in the mode of impossibility. Rendered
possible, it is no longer the same desire, no
longer revolutionary but totalitarian. The idea of
possibly intervening in regimes of definition and
perception is downright frightening (it also opens up
the black comic possibility of a Charlie Kaufmanesque
nightmare of botched interventions), and with good
reason "remains unengaged in de Man's text." As far as
I can tell, the Cohen-Cohen-Miller angle on materiality
is the wrong end of materialist criticism: it
retranscendentalizes materialism rather than
understanding materialism as something that
detranscendentalizes form.
III.
-
In his thoroughly brilliant book Ends of the
Lyric, Timothy Bahti draws a distinction between
"seeing" and "reading" using the example of
Shakespeare's Sonnet 43:
When most I wink, then do my eyes best see,
For all the day they view things unrespected,
But when I sleep, in dreams they look on thee,
And darkly bright, are bright in dark directed.
Then thou, whose shadow shadows doth make
bright
How would thy shadow's form form happy show
To the clear day with thy much clearer light,
When to unseeing eyes thy shade shines so!
How would, I say, mine eyes be blessèd
made,
By looking on thee in the living day,
When in dead night thy fair imperfect shade
Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth
stay!
All days are nights to see until I see thee,
And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.
Bahti notes that the poem's chiasmi of repeating
words can be noticed even by a reader who doesn't know
English, as in line 4: "darkly bright . . . bright, are
bright . . . bright in dark." "So far, this is only
seeing, not reading," he remarks (33). Others depend on
semantics, like line 1's "most I . . . eyes best" (34).
We could say that the chiasmus can be filled in with
intuitive or symbolic content—literal or
figurative seeing—while the chiasmic form
channels us toward understanding ("seeing" in a
metaphoric sense), that "dark, bright, bright, dark,"
is like "most, I, eyes, best." But "reading,"
Bahti asserts, "necessitates the distinction of sense
as meaning from sense as the sense-perception of
vision, the precise distinction of actual letters seen
and actual letters not seen (no longer seen) but read
acting" (38). He continues, "reading would appear' [at
the end of the poem] if it were something one could
see, but instead one can only read the vanishing of
sight" (39). Bahti figures reading as seeing
plus interpreting minus seeing, so
the end of the process recedes over the horizon, under
the line at the end of the column/poem: sublime.
Described as though it were given, the perceptual
process of seeing is made to provide ballast for
reading-in-abstraction-from-seeing, an "end" of lyric
in a reading remaining to be seen. There is a double
sense of "reading" here: as participle, reading is what
we do as we see and interpret; as abstract noun, it is
the never wholly attained end product of seeing,
interpreting, and learning not to see.
-
The assumption is that texts and reading, like
tyrannies, are not phenomenal entities and processes,
while pages and retinal activities, like pepper
grinders, are. We are so used to thinking
metaphysically, whether in deconstructive or in
humanistic subgroups—especially those of us who
work on lyric—that it is hard to imagine any
other way of approaching seeing and reading. But what
if texts and tyrannies and retinal activities
were on the same level—were alike
empirical entities, not aesthetic ones, only subject to
more or less complex inspection? If there were, it
would become evident that inspection itself is a
difficulty all the way down (or up).
-
Daniel Dennett, in a typically brisk fifteen-page
treatment of a vast question, in this case an essay
called "Seeing is Believing—or Is It?," asks how
we know when we've seen something. What
Dennett poses as "the nature of takings'" is none other
than the question of seeing and reading—the
question of whether and when "a state of the nervous
system" is to count as a "perception" (340,337). How do
we know we've seen something? We remember it, so we
believe we've had a perception; or we took a photo, and
believe that the photo is a picture of what we
perceived. "One of the reasons people tend to see a
contrast" between belief and perception, according to
Dennett, "is that they tend to think of perceptual
states as much richer in content than mere belief
states" (341). Not always: Scarry, stressing mental
images, thinks of ordinary perceptual states as richer
than what Dennett calls belief states (memories,
conjurings), but thinks of literary belief states as
being as rich as ordinary perceptual states. Bahti,
stressing texts, understandably thinks of
interpretations, belief states, as richer than the
perceptual states of seeing letters. For my argument,
though, it doesn't matter which way the values go. What
matters is the dualism and its tendency to obscure
"what happens in the middle," which in Dennett's
opinion is everything. "No sane participant . . . would
claim that the product of perception was either
literally a picture in the head or literally a sentence
in the head. Both ways of talking are reckoned as
metaphors" (342), he remarks. "We should be leery of
metaphor," he goes on, "but is there any alternative at
this point?" (343). In the end, Dennett argues, "the
idea that we can identify perceptual—as
opposed to conceptual—states by an evaluation of
their contents turns out to be an illusion" (352).
-
In illustrating this point, Dennett calls upon the
classical celebration of hypotyposis as a presentation
modeled on vision: "After all"—he channels an
interlocutor—"perceptions are like pictures,
beliefs are like sentences, and a picture's worth a
thousand words. But," he goes on, "these are spurious
connotations. There is no upper bound on the
richness of content of a proposition" (341). The
allusion to the rhetorical tradition is not casual:
much of Dennett's discussion constitutes a commentary
on metaphoric transfer from the perspective of
empirical studies of perception. For the eliminativist
Dennett, who believes that only technological obstacles
prevent consciousness from being analyzed into directly
or indirectly observable material elements, analogies
between perception and cognition are not effectively
ideological. Rather, it is the concept "cognition" that
makes it sound as though there were supernatural
substances or forces immune in principle to even the
most powerful and indirect observation. For Dennett
cognitions are in principle observable, while under the
current scientific understanding, perception is
scarcely less enigmatic than cognition. A cognition is
like a perception not because it's as plain as day but
because it's as clear as mud. Thus it is neither
illuminating nor mystifying to compare cognition to
perception. Because there is no nonmetaphorical way of
talking about what even a perception is,
seeing—in the ambiguous,
sense-conflating sense—after all better
represents the state of knowledge regarding perception
and cognition than a distinction between "perception"
and "cognition" which can be made logically but cannot
be grounded in any difference in content.
-
Perceptions are like pictures, beliefs are like
sentences—and perceptions are like sentences, and
beliefs are like pictures. Until we know more, a
thousand words on the topic are not yet worth a dime.
As a deconstructive materialist writing in the wake of
Paul de Man, I would rather tell you that than "burden
the system with extra machinery," as Dennett puts it,
"—scene-painting machinery or
script-writing machinery" (344). Either kind of
machinery resubscribes to systems of mind that
understate the complexity, not only of reading, but of
the very idea of sensory perception, which nonetheless
remains the only channel epistemology gets.
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