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To judge by recent trends in literary criticism that fall under the general rubric of material culture studies—practices as varied as history-of-the-book, thing theory, and various types of quantitative methods in the humanities—the matter of what counts as materialism in literature is far from settled. These trends tend to read literature's materiality literally, considering matter, objects, and things as the physical remainders of a pragmatic phenomenalism whose ultimate horizon of inquiry is the referential context in which the literary operates, rather than the operations of the literary itself as a historical referent. Much methodological stock is put into the work of analogy, so that, by treating the literary object as just another object in a world of objects, literature's historical impact is determined by tracing the specific modes of production, distribution, and consumption that make literature a cultural commodity in the global marketplace. And even when the literary object is understood as a symbolic repository of material history, an object that contains other objects, it is its formidable mimetic powers that are made to account almost entirely for its cultural work. The historicity of literature, in this view, rests on its ability to influence, coerce, or otherwise discipline its readers, who are often portrayed as the always-already interpellated subjects of an ideology literature can do no more than re-inscribe as a narrative of subject construction.
The materiality of literature, in any case, remains elusive: on the one hand, to study literature as an object is to bracket its defining characteristic as a literary work–the fact of its literariness; on the other, to limit the historical role of the novel to the effects it has on its readers is to subscribe uncritically to its referential function–the fact that it can only be read literally, as a medium to the material culture that is said to exist outside of, and in spite of, its qualities as literature. Accordingly, despite the claims they make about literature's historical impact, these accounts tend to occlude the materiality of that which makes literature matter: its language. This is a surprising occlusion, not least because there has been a longstanding awareness of the materiality of the literary that in many cases predates current critical trends within material culture studies and object-centered literary analyses that ostensibly seek to specify literature's historical role.
I don't wish to suggest that we should rehabilitate the notion of linguistic
materiality uncritically, but we ought nevertheless to recall its speculative force
in the arguments we make about literature's material history, if only as a first step
toward providing a more robust account of the specificities of literary practice as
well as its institutional determinations. A very partial critical genealogy—from
Roland Barthes's formulation of the "
In what follows I address in a preliminary and provisional way two questions that move in this direction: 1) Can a meaningful distinction be made between linguistic and literary materiality? And, if so, 2) is there a conceptual advantage in construing this singular essence of the literary as a form of immanence?
The most commonly cited model of linguistic materiality is the one formulated by Paul de Man in his reading of Immanuel Kant's third
In de Man's formulation, materialism is a non-phenomenalizable attribute of language that nevertheless has effects in the world that are empirically verifiable, insofar as they belong to a pragmatic order of discourse. This form of materialism is therefore historical in a strong sense, even if it does not strictly conform, in this telling, to what we would recognize as "historical materialism." When, in
Indeed, even among Marxist critics who focus on the "mode of production," there is no consensus regarding the best method of approaching the materiality of literature. In a 1991 essay aptly, though perhaps optimistically, titled
Frances Ferguson makes a valuable distinction between what she calls "deconstructive materialism" and "social materialism" on the basis of the relation between language and the objects to which it refers. In the latter, objects are endowed with meaning to the extent that they can enter or be entered into a causal relation with individuals; the former, in contrast, emphasizes the "primacy of the material signifier in both embodying and interfering with any and all such casual accounts" (10). It follows that the view of language as a referential relay that transparently connects our perceptions of objects with the objects themselves comes under suspicion as the materiality of the letter becomes itself an object of knowledge whose very opacity seems to be derived from its apparent insubstantiality.
In de Man, the materiality of language is what remains when the text is evacuated of
its historical and humanistic determinations, and can therefore only be accessed in
language by means of its allegorizations—even—or especially, when these are of a
performative order. It is tempting in this context to equate the materiality of
language with the institutional history of performative speech acts so as to be able
to claim that literature is itself an act of speech that has real effects in the
world. But this would be to confuse, as de Man once put it, "the materiality of the
signifier with the materiality of what it signifies." Andrzej Warminski coins the
term "super-performative" to designate not a performative that "functions
Formulated in these terms, the materiality of language seems to be an attribute of language that operates without recourse to any properly literary function. It is "prosaic" in that it would not even be determined by language itself. Yet, the "absolute, radical formalism" that marks for de Man, in his reading of Kant, the passage from reference to performativity should be read literally. It makes sense from this perspective to speak of a literary materialism as opposed to a linguistic materialism, provided we revise our commonsense notion of the literary as a referential medium that captures objects, things, matter. We must understand literature, in other words, as poets do; that is, as language itself.
But how can we access the historical, empirical effects of language-as-literature? What form of historical agency does it constitute? Gilles Deleuze's conceptualization of immanence (or the plane of immanence) can help us stage an empirical thinking of the literary that might provide an alternative model for historical agency. In
Consider how Deleuze illustrates his notion of immanence: "No one," writes Deleuze,
"has described what
Deleuze does not quote Dicken's text directly, but something similar can be said
about the way Dickens himself renders the moment of Riderhood's death and his curious
resurrection. At first, Riderhood's inert body inspires a modicum of sympathy from
those whom Riderhood, in life, has otherwise alienated. Doctor examines the
dank carcase, and pronounces, not hopefully, that it is worth while trying to
reanimate the same. All the best means are at once in action, and everybody
present lends a hand, and a heart and soul. No one has the least regard for the
man; with them all, he has been an object of avoidance, suspicion, and aversion;
but the spark of life within him is curiously separable from himself now, and they
have a deep interest in it, probably because it IS life, and they are living and
must die. (Dickens 443)
Notice in this passage the use of the present
tense, a device common enough in Dickens when a sense of urgency gives narrative
expediency to the event being described, but here explicitly bracketing Riderhood's
reanimation as though the chapter as a whole in which it is effected had emerged—had
come alive in the present or been restored—from an otherwise conventional narrative
flow rendered in the preterite. The preterite tense, as Barthes notes in
Similarly, when the passage apostrophizes Riderhood directly, as though to call him
back to life, the structure of address breaks with convention by creating a
first-person plural subject position from which those attending to the "flabby lump
of mortality," and possibly those "below," are all given voice. If you are not
gone for good, Mr. Riderhood, it would be something to know where you are hiding
at present. This flabby lump of mortality that we work so hard at with such
patient perseverance, yields no sign of you. If you are gone for good, Rogue, it
is very solemn, and if you are coming back, it is hardly less so. Nay, in the
suspense and mystery of the latter question, involving that of where you may be
now, there is a solemnity even added to that of death, making us who are in
attendance alike afraid to look on you and to look off you, and making those below
start at the least sound of a creaking plank in the floor. (444)
The
distance separating the more formal "Mr. Riderhood" and the familiar name "Rogue"
with which most of the characters in the novel refer to him is also marked as a
grammatical distinction between a form of address that would refer to him as though
absent in the third person and a positing of the name that would make him a familiar
presence. Moreover, the phrase "no sign of you" both signals Riderhood's precarious
hold on life, and also, if read literally, the absence of the "you" being
apostrophized, as though the sign "you" had no purchase in the scene of address
staged between life-and-death. The effect is a radical suspension of reference that
yields no "you"—or, for that matter, no "I"—that could become a subject of
enunciation, whether plural or singular, and thereby suspends the action of the novel
insofar as the subject pronoun carries the narrative. Indeed, it is the "he,"
according to Barthes, that performs the service of both signifying the novelistic as
artifice and naturalizing this artifice as the "real."
Riderhood's precarious narrative existence is accompanied (indeed accomplished) by a
process of formal de-realization that Dickens began in this episode by reversing and
displacing conventional novelistic forms of utterance such as grammatical tense and
narrative voice. This process is radicalized by a virtual suspension of novelistic
discourse itself. Stay! Did that eyelid tremble? So the doctor, breathing low,
and closely watching, asks himself.
No.
Did that nostril twitch?
No.
This artificial respiration ceasing, do I feel any faint flutter under my hand
upon the chest?
No.
Over and over again No. No. But try over and over again, nevertheless.
See! A token of life! An indubitable token of life! The spark may smoulder and
go out, or it may glow and expand, but see! (444)
The almost theatrical
disposition of this paratactic passage (almost because the "No"s could hardly be
staged) suggests the rejection or the abandonment of novelistic convention, as
thought the convention that would portray Riderhood coincided with his ability to
remain alive. To be sure, the iteration of "No" in this passage marks the
interruption of narrative coherence and representational verisimilitude, but the loss
of referential logic also makes visible a linguistic struggle whose stakes are
nothing short of "life" itself. The use of the "No" seems at first to negate the
force of the exclamation "Stay!" (a locution with no stated subject of enunciation)
and of the doctor's questions, asked in silence, to himself, "breathing low." Yet,
the insistence of the evidentiary "See!" and the ambiguously referential "a token of
life!" (ambiguous because while "life" has no adequate referent in reality, the use
of "token" in the phrase suggests that it is figuratively accessible) constitute a
catachrestic positing of the materiality of language itself. The performative force
of the utterance "No" may well deflate the attempt to reanimate Rogue through the
mere act of naming, but a rhetorical counterweight is found to take the place of a
nominal accounting of "Mr. Riderhood" in the figure of the "spark."
The figure of the "spark" returns in another passage that marks Rogue's reinscription
into the social coordinates of his past life, and thus into the novelistic
elaboration of his identity. Indeed, the language of the passage hints at a return to
conventional novelistic modality: The spark of life was deeply interesting
while it was in abeyance, but now that it has got established in Mr. Riderhood,
there appears to be a general desire that circumstances had admitted of its being
developed in anybody else, rather than that gentleman. (446-7)
The radical
formalism of the entire episode makes the rendering of a life a matter of great
literary interest, as though the text itself were coming alive before our very eyes.
The text's use of the "spark of life" to mark this passage suggests that, as a figure
for life—for a life, as Deleuze reads it—the "spark of life" can also be read as a
figure for what I have been calling literary immanence, a material existence that
renders literature alive. This rendering-alive of literature might get us closer to a
thinking of empiricism from which the historical, doubly empirical determinations so
familiar to material culture studies could be used to think of agency as a material
becoming of the literary.