Overcoming Resistances: The Ethics of Exclusion

The development of any particular literary theory begins with the formalization and articulation of "resistances" to the beliefs and methods of the currently dominant theories. In the most basic terms, new literary theories come into existence as critiques of older theories, as the exposure and correction of interpretive weaknesses in the established schools. Prior to the emergence of the Post-Structuralists, each new critique of theory was put forth as the final solution to the problem of literary meaning: in arguing for its new interpretation, each school of literary theory puts forth its own methodologies, terminologies, and ideologies which are meant to utterly replace those of the previous theories.

In the hands of the New Critics, for example, the shortcomings of the dominant affective and intentional schools of interpretation were made explicit and the methods developed for not committing these affective and intentionalist fallacies became for the New Critics not simply a more correct way of reading but the only correct way of reading. The New Critics claimed that by focusing on the author’s intentions or the reader’s emotional responses the current schools of interpretation were excluding the work itself from consideration. By reading the work as a unity and then focusing on concepts such as irony, paradox, and the impossibility of paraphrase internal to poetic works, the New Critics effectively shifted the exclusions of literary theory from one set (the text) to another (the biography of the author and the psychology of the reader). This pattern repeats itself across the history of literary theory: Shklovsky's attack of Potebnya to establish the tenants of Russian Formalism over those of the Symbolists by shifting the focus of theory from image to technique is one example; Levi-Strauss' initiation of the Structuralist movement by dismissing contemporary anthropological and psychoanalytic interpretations of myths by revealing their exclusion of the underlying logic or structures of the myths (and thereby shifting the focus to that logical structure) serves as a second.

Unlike these previous developments, however, the theorists grouped together under the Post-Structuralist title do not share a single method nor have they entirely abandoned those of the previous theories. Instead, the Post-Structuralists seek to expand theory's view by taking into consideration the exclusions made by theory. In the case of his Resistance to Theory, Paul De Man calls to our attention the Structuralist exclusion of rhetoric and the changes that take place when we consider those excluded surface structures. In the case of Stanley Fish, the analysis of the exclusions of formalist theories and then his own Reader-Response theory calls to our attention the existence of differing contexts and their effects on interpretation, shifting our attention from the text to the interpretive strategies we bring to (and use to create) the text. And finally, in the case of Jacques Derrida, the need for a consistent ethics of discussion between theories and theorists is made evident in his discussion with James Searle. The overall trend of the Post-Structuralists as we explore De Man, Fish and Derrida is the exposure of exclusions in theory, and in the case of Fish and Derrida, the shifting of the focus of discourse from the contents of the text (and those objects that are included and excluded by our definition of the text) to the contexts of texts, which achieves two primary goals: first, the reintegration of those objects or threads of discussion which prior theories (arbitrarily) excluded; and second to call to our attention the ethics of discussion itself—the moral choices involved and revealed by what we, as adherents to any one theory or viewpoint, chose to include and exclude.

De Man's Resistance to Structuralism: The Exclusion of the Rhetorical

Focusing on Structuralism in his essay Resistance to Theory, Paul De Man discusses how the Structuralist/Semiotic methodology was itself perceived by its proponents as the final correction of misreading. De Man makes explicit the belief that Structuralism was the ultimate and universal grammar of interpretation in his discussion of Greimas:

Greimas disputes the right to use the dignity of "grammar" to describe a reading that would not be committed to universality. Those who have doubts about the semiotic method, he writes, "postulate the necessity of constructing a grammar for each particular text. But the essence (le propre) of a grammar is its ability to account for a large number of texts, and the metaphorical use of the term...fails to hide the fact that one has, in fact, given up the semiotic project" (De Man, 14)

and therefore given up literary theory itself. According to De Man "there is no doubt that what is here prudently called 'a large number' implies the hope at least of a future model that would in fact be applicable to the generation of all texts (De Man, 14)." For Structuralists such as Greimas, the method being developed to analyze "deep grammars" was believed to be not one of several possible means of interpreting literary works but instead a process on the verge of discovering a universal "grammar" that could be used to approach all texts in the world. Simply restated, the Structuralists sought a "unified theory" of language, modeling and interpretation, and they believed the answer lay in grammar.

This "deep grammar" that was the focus of the Structuralist approach did indeed make possible the comparative analysis of many objects previously abandoned by or closed off from literary theory. Although the Structuralists shared the New Critics' starting point of rebellion against intention and affect and both sought to bracket aside everything external to the text, the Structuralists' interest lay in the linguistic and structural units of texts and not the New Critics' interest in the organic unity of individual works. This interest in the linguistic or grammatical features found within and between texts opened for the Structuralists both objects and avenues of study that The New Critical approach had excluded. By rewriting all things in nature as objects of language approachable through linguistic means, the Structuralist/Semiotic method made it possible for analysts such as Louis Martin, for example, to conceptualize Disneyland as a text and therefore approach a tour of the park as he would a narrative, an avenue of study impossible for the New Critics. As described by Julia Kristeva, critical science (in this case, The Critical Theory, or Semiotics) was not simply a way to interpret meaning from individual works; it was itself a language or grammar forming a theory of theories, a self-correcting scientific model which served to facilitate the understanding of how other models work, applicable to all aspects of reality, not just literary constructions.

De Man describes this Structuralist methodology, based on Saussurian linguistics, as a foregrounding of the grammatical over the rhetorical (and therefore an exclusion of the one by the other), a mathematical model that implies a direct one-to-one correspondence between linguistic systems and the physical world language refers to. Within Structuralism, grammar becomes the sole source of knowledge:

This articulation of the sciences of language with the mathematical sciences represents a particularly compelling version of a continuity between a theory of language, as logic, and the knowledge of the phenomenal world to which mathematics gives us access. (De Man, 14)

Indeed, common sense tells us that "grammar stands in service to logic which, in turn, allows for the passage to the knowledge of the world (De Man, 15)." De Man points out that the "explicit program" of excluding the rhetorical is so ingrained in the Structuralist approach that it is, in fact, inseparable from its terminology:

The tendency to replace a rhetorical by a grammatical terminology (to speak of hypotaxis, for instance, to designate anamorphic or metonymic tropes) is part of an explicit program, a program that is entirely admirable in its intent since it tends towards the mastering and the clarification of meaning. (De Man, 16)

But this model only serves us as long as we ignore the rhetorical or surface elements of a text:

Difficulties occur when it is no longer possible to ignore the epistemological thrust of the rhetorical dimension of discourse, that is, when it is no longer possible to keep it in its place as a mere adjunct, a mere ornament within the semantic function. (De Man, 15)

De Man brings to our attention the fact that, although Structuralism vastly expands the canon of works available for study compared to the New Critics, their method nonetheless excludes a valuable source of information within texts--rhetorical constructions. As soon as rhetorical constructions are taken into consideration, rhetoric

intervenes as a decisive but unsettling element which, in a variety of modes and aspects, disrupts the inner balance of the model and, consequently, its outwards extension to the non-verbal world as well. (De Man, 14)

Despite Structuralism's attempt to ignore the rhetorical aspects of the text, rhetorical constructions such as tropes serve a semantic function which cannot be ignored and which "pertain primordially to language (De Man, 15)," not to grammar or logic. "They are text-producing functions that are not necessarily patterned on a non-verbal entity, whereas grammar is by definition capable of extra-linguistic generalization (De Man, 15)." Indeed,

once a reader has become aware of the rhetorical dimensions of a text, he will not be amiss in finding textual instances that are irreducible to grammar or to historically determined meaning, provided only he is willing to acknowledge what he is bound to notice. (De Man, 18)

Thus, "no grammatical decoding, however refined, could claim to reach the determining figural dimensions of a text (De Man, 16)," because, without any consideration for rhetoric and trapped as it is inside its own methods and its foregrounding of grammar, it always "leaves a residue of indetermination that has to be, but cannot be, resolved by grammatical means (De Man, 15)." The focus that Structuralism and Semiotics place on the grammatical decomposition and recomposition of texts excludes or marginalizes the surface or rhetorical elements of the work. For De Man this denial of the rhetorical is a denial of the activity of reading itself, an activity which "partakes of both" grammar and rhetoric.

A New Ethics: The Shift From Structuralism to Post-Structuralism

However, in putting forth his approach not once does De Man suggest that the Structuralist methods be abandoned entirely--only that we acknowledge that they fill a particular role and serve a particular purpose within the limits imposed by their methodology, terminology, and ideology; in other words, only that we acknowledge that which Structuralism has excluded. This realization, that a theoretical method as useful and well-accepted as Structuralism has limitations and therefore must exist alongside other interpretive strategies, is the initial theoretical step taken by each of the analysts collectively known as the Post-Structuralists. Unlike previous theoretical developments which sought to isolate themselves and utterly sever, both politically and ideologically, their methods from those of previous schools of thought, the post designator in the title that groups together such diverse theorists as Stanley Fish, Jacques Derrida, and Paul De Man indicates not a severing or breaking from the Structuralist methods but an inclusive-expansion; not a turning-away from previous theory but an enlarged perspective of those theories that considers that which they have excluded.

Once the condition of acknowledging the assumptions and exclusions of a particular analysis becomes a logical prerequisite for one's arguments, the condition then also becomes an ethical necessity for continued discourse between individuals and groups. Each of the Post-Structuralists begins their arguments by posing the questions: what do current literary theories exclude, and what do those exclusions tell us?—not just positing a new set of exclusions as part of a new literary theory, but examining the role the exclusions themselves play and exploring what occurs when we take those exclusions back into consideration. In De Man's case, we find that Structuralism has excluded rhetoric from its field of critical vision, and that while doing so makes deep structures within the text available to us it also denies the surface structures--literally, half of what we are exposed to when we read. With Stanley Fish we find two exclusions, the interplay between which forces us to step back far enough to become aware of what is going on outside the text as much as what occurs within it. First, from his initial position as a Reader-Response theorist, Fish questions the formalist theories' exclusion of the reader's responses, experiences, and interpretive decisions; and then, once he turns his critical eye on himself, he questions on a much larger scale what critical language and theorization in general have excluded from the very fields they supposedly make possible.

In a manner similar to De Man, Stanley Fish begins his discussion in Interpreting The Variorum by attacking formalist criticism and then continues on to highlight the strengths of his own Reader-Response theory by comparing it to the formalist methods he has just finished critiquing. Ironically, this attack is executed in almost exactly the same manner that Wimsatt and Beardsley began the New Critical formalist movement with their critique of the affective and intentionalist schools:

the sins of formalist-positivist analysis are primarily sins of omission, not an inability to explain phenomena but an inability to see that they are there because its assumptions make it inevitable that they will be overlooked or suppressed. (Fish, 152)

Fish posits that the formalist approach hasn't really done away with the reader's experience; it has, through the distorting lens of its methodology and ideology, merely suppressed its (and therefore, our) recognition of it. By examining several of Milton's sonnets, Fish shows how the formal units and spatial arrangements imposed or created by formalist interpretations "will always point in as many directions as there are interpreters (Fish, 150)," and how the temporal arrangements and concept of syntactic or semantic slide put forth by Reader-Response analysis "corrects" this formalist misreading:

In each of the sonnets we have considered, the significant word or phrase occurs at a line break where a reader is invited to place it first in one and then in another structure of syntax and sense. This moment of hesitation, of semantic or syntactic slide, is crucial to the experience the verse provides, but in a formalist analysis that moment will disappear, either because it has been flattened out and made into an (insoluble) interpretive crux or because it has been eliminated in the course of a procedure that is incapable of finding value in temporal phenomena. (Fish, 155)

Unlike De Man, however, Fish's very argument, and its similarity to the arguments used by those formalists he just criticized, force him to come to the realization that his Reader-Response readings are, in fact, just another interpretation: "in short, what is noticed [by any particular theoretical approach] is what has been made noticeable, not by a clear and undistorting glass, but by an interpretive strategy (Fish, 166)." Not The Final Reading, but the most current or most immediate of various possible readings. Fish realizes

how easy it is to surrender to the bias of our critical language and begin to talk as if poems, not readers or interpreters, did things. Words like "encourage" and "disallow" (and others I have used in this essay) imply agents, and it is only "natural" to assign agency first to an author's intention and then to the forms that assumedly embody them. What really happens, I think, is something quite different: rather than intention and its formal realization producing interpretation (the "normal" picture), interpretation creates intention and its formal realization by creating the conditions in which it becomes possible to pick them out. (Fish, 163)

It is the way we read, not what we read, that produces meaning. Since the way we read is contextual--a activity we have learned from others and which we share and define culturally--the meanings that are produced are generated not from the text but from the interests we hold and introduce to the text. Fish explores this in his reading of his reading of Lycidas:

In the analysis of these lines from Lycidas I did what critics always do: I "saw" what my interpretive principles permitted or directed me to see, and then I turned around and attributed what I had "seen" to a text and an interpretation. (Fish, 163)

Finally, the "final reading" of a text is only as final as the group that produced it--as the group changes to include or exclude participants, problematics, or procedures, so does the reading.

What Fish is asking us to do is to ask why a particular group or interpretive community includes or excludes particular artifacts, and to consider what the answer tells us about ourselves, our society, and the texts that we read. Once this realization has been made a new theory of theories inevitably forms, and its morality becomes clear:

the choice is never between objectivity and interpretation but between an interpretation that is unacknowledged as such and an interpretation that is at least aware of itself. It is this awareness that I am claiming for myself, although in so doing I must give up the claims implicitly made in the first part of this essay [regarding Reader-Response analysis]. There I argue that a bad (because spatial) model has suppressed what was really happening, but by my own declared principles the notion "really happening" is just one more interpretation. (Fish, 167)

Thus a totally different kind of break within the critical tradition takes place: instead of simply "correcting" the accepted way of reading texts—in this case, shifting from a spatial to temporal reading, and thereby initiating a new "school" of literary criticism with its own particular priorities, problematics, and interests—Fish describes a model which explains how and why these different schools or interpretive communities can exist and change. Instead of "fixing" the meaning of texts, the concept of interpretive communities allows for the generation of an infinite number of texts, each generated by the interests or concerns of the group of readers discussing it.

Fish does not engender a new theory of reading that allows a particular interpretive culture to dominate literary society; instead he forces a global paradigm shift in which interpretive communities can coexist in the world as stable groups of readers, each "made up of those who share interpretive strategies not for reading (in the conventional sense) but for writing texts, for constituting their properties and assigning their intentions (Fish, 171)." Unlike previous theories (such as the formalist approaches against which he argues at the beginning of his essay, which posit a singular correct method of reading), Fish's concept of interpretive communities, of interpretation through consensus outside the text, acknowledges that any theoretical movement takes root and gains strength because it serves a contemporary need or matter of importance to the group:

My fiction is liberating. It relieves me of the obligation to be right (a standard which simply drops out) and demands only that I be interesting (a standard that can be met without any reference at all to an illusory objectivity). Rather than restoring or recovering texts, I am in the business of making texts and of teaching others to make them by adding to their repertoire of strategies. (Fish, 180)

It is this movement away from a supposed objectivity towards a subjectivity made valid through consensus that allows, for example, the feminist movement to reread and rewrite texts from the standpoint of their interest in gender issues--a reading previously excluded because evidence for it did not exist "within" the texts in question. Formalist theories assume a white, educated, affluent, heterosexual male reader by focusing on the "formal structures" within a text to such an extent that they are forced to ignore (i.e., exclude) the possibility that female readers and writers approach texts (and "constitute their properties and assign their intentions") differently than male readers. Once we recognize that different groups of readers generate texts differently it becomes impossible for one "correct" meaning to override other possible meanings, or for one group of readers to be "right" by highlighting one set of formal structures or interpretive strategies over other sets. What comes to the foreground instead is an ethical necessity, both in general reading and in theoretical argumentation, for a discussion that acknowledges its biases and the biases of the group that proposes it. In more general terms, the advent of the Post-Structuralist ethic of reading is in fact the advent of an obligation to--as opposed to a continued marginalization of--the readers, objects, and methods subjected to theoretical exclusion.

Post-Structuralism: A New Ethics of Critical Science

Thus, in the Post-Structuralist world what becomes important is not questions of right-reading or wrong-reading, or of one theoretical model dominating another, but of clear and ethical communication between groups of reader-interpreters. The standard of measurement ceases to be an arbitrary objectivity and becomes instead an awareness of and consideration for objects, modes, methods, or concerns marginalized or excluded by any given theoretical approach.

It is on this stage that Jacques Derrida's Deconstructionist approach, specifically geared at exposing and questioning exclusions or "conceptual oppositions," was repeatedly accused of being nihilist, of being a philosophy that suspends, refutes, or otherwise ignores the possibility of meaning. Derrida, discussing the incomplete or inaccurate readings and the misleading quotations of his work by James Searle, disagrees:

For of course there is a "right track" [une 'bonne voie'], a better way, and let it be said in passing how surprised I have often been, how amused or discouraged, depending on my humor, by the use or abuse of the following argument: Since the deconstructionists (which is to say, isn't it, the skeptic-relativist-nihilist!) is supposed not to believe in truth, stability, or the unity of meaning, in intention or 'meaning to say,' how can he demand of us that we read him with pertinence, precision, rigor? How can he demand that his own text be interpreted correctly? How can he accuse anyone else of having misunderstood, simplified, deformed it, etc.? In other words, how can he discuss, and discuss the reading of what he writes? The answer is simple enough: this definition of the deconstructionist is false (that's right: false, not true) and feeble; it supposes a bad (that's right: bad, not good) and feeble reading of numerous texts, first of all mine, which therefore must finally be read or reread. Then perhaps it will be understood that the value of truth (and all those values associated with it) is never contested or destroyed in my writings, but only reinscribed in more powerful, larger, more stratified contexts. And within interpretive contexts (that is, relations of force that are always differential--for example, socio-political-institutional--but even beyond these determinations) that are relatively stable, sometimes apparently more than unshakeable, it should be possible to invoke rules of competence, criteria of discussion and of consensus, good faith, lucidity, rigor, criticism, and pedagogy. (Derrida, 146)

Only the most ardent professor of literary theory would argue against the average student's claim that reading Derrida's Limited, Inc a b c... is a difficult chore, but even the most irritated student would have to agree with the professor that Derrida's ethical position is ironclad. By quoting or citing the entirety of Searle's text, Derrida illustrates both the necessity for an ethical approach to reading and discourse (which for Derrida are one and the same), and illustrates (i.e., shows, not tells) the failures, shortcomings and danger inherent to Searle's unethical use of rhetoric, abbreviation, and incomplete "iterations:"

In this regard I certainly do at times disapprove of the politics of this practice, of certain of its moments in any case: to insult an author instead of criticizing him, through demonstration, to accuse the other of a distressing penchant for saying things that are "obviously false" and of a thousand "confusions" while not taking the trouble to read any of the incriminated writings with the slightest attention (this I have tried to demonstrate and will not repeat; it is the entire object of "Limited Inc..."), and above all, to attempt in newspaper articles for instance to turn gossip into an argument in order to accuse me and with me all those interested in my work, of "terrorist obscurantism." (Derrida, 139)

Derrida never claims that being ethical is easy, however. In his response to Gerald Graff in Afterward: Toward An Ethic of Discussion, Derrida describes the difficulty of reading Limited, Inc a b c...:

I would like to say a word about the rhetoric of the text, in its principal modality. In so doing I shall also explain why things will be different as far as this letter is concerned. "Limited Inc" makes uncomfortable reading because its text is written in at least two registers at once, for it answers at least two imperatives. On the one hand, I try to submit myself to the most demanding norms of classical philosophical discussion. I try in fact to respond point by point, in the most honest and rational way possible, to Searle's arguments, the text of which is cited almost in its entirety. On the other hand, in so doing I multiply statements, discursive gestures, forms of writing, the structure of which reinforces my demonstration in something lake a practical manner: that is, by providing instances of "speech acts" which by themselves render impractable and theoretically insufficient the conceptual oppositions upon which speech act theory in general, and Searle's version of it in particular, relies (serious/nonserious; literal/metaphoric or ironic; normal forms/parasitic forms; use/mention; intentional/nonintentional; etc.). This dual writing seemed to me to be consistent with the propositions I wanted simultaneously to demonstrate on the theoretical level and to exemplify in the practice of speech acts. Of speech acts concerning which I did not want forgotten that they are written, and that this opens up possibilities and problems which are not negligible. Moreover, it was as if I was telling Searle, in addition: Try to interpret this text too with your categories--and to you, as well as the reader, I say: enjoy! (Derrida, 114)

Thus, within the text of Limited, Inc a b c... Derrida illustrates the two major movements within Post-Structuralism as we have defined it. First, that any given literary theory foregrounds its constructions of importance at the expense of or by excluding other constructions (in this case, Searle's exclusions of so-called parasitic speech acts; or in his response to Derrida's Signature Event Context, his exclusion of what he considers to be Derrida's "unimportant" arguments), and that those exclusions are at best, if acknowledged, indicators of the concerns, interests, or problematics of those that propose the theory in question; and at worst arbitrary choices that, if made without acknowledgement, will make impossible any attempts at fair discussion. Second--and especially considering the best case stated above, that any particular theory's exclusions serve as indicators of the concerns of the group--that groups must interact with each other ethically if they which to survive in the world. By acknowledging that which our readings exclude we are not only forced to strengthen or reconsider our own arguments by addressing our exclusions, we are also forced to consider, if not appreciate, the status of other groups which do place weight or have interest in the objects we have excluded. What was once a battle, a matter of theoretical argumentation, becomes a cultural discussion, an series of exchanges made in full view, not with the desire to win or dominate but instead to learn from one another--a global, not local, advance.

07/08/2006

Posted on 07/08/2006
Copyright © 2024 Richard Paez