After Strange Texts: The Role of Theory in the Study of Literature

The Role of Theory in the Study of Literature?

GREGORY S. JAY AND DAVID L. MILLER

Framing, as the nature of modern technology, derives from the Greek way of experiencing letting-lie-forth, logos, from the Greek poiesis and thesis. In setting up the frame, the framework—which now means in commandeering everything into assured availability—there sounds the claim of the ratio reddenda, i.e., of the logon didonai, but in such a way that today this claim that is made in framing takes control of the absolute, and the process of representation—of Vor-stellen or putting forth—takes form, on the basis of the Greek perception, as making secure, fixing in place.

—Heidegger, The Origin of the Work of Art

That which produces and manipulates the frame sets everything in motion to efface its effect, most often by naturalizing it to infinity, in God’s keeping. . . . Deconstruction must neither reframe nor fantasize the pure and simple absence of the frame.

—Derrida, The Parergon

While this introduction will provide a framework for the essays to follow, we will not attempt a comprehensive survey of recent theoretical approaches to the study of literature. The last few years have brought an abundance of explanatory books and articles on such topics as structuralism and poststructuralism, deconstruction, Marxism, feminism, semiotics, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, and rhetoric.¹ Every reader will have a different familiarity with one or more of these movements and a different set of opinions about them. Rather than offer a hasty sketch of the entire field (repeating helpful but already available generalizations), we have chosen to outline a problem common to all these schools for interpretive scandal: How does the choice of a particular theoretical perspective alter the practice of reading, and, reciprocally, how do altered practices of reading open new theoretical perspectives?

With two exceptions, the essays in this volume were presented at a symposium entitled The Role of Theory in the Study of Literature. Some readers may conclude that an equally apt title might have been The Role of Literature in the Study of Theory. This sliding of the topic between seemingly opposed standpoints is only to be expected, since practice always implies its own theory, while theory exists only as a form of practice. Instead of a well-marked passageway from generally accepted rules to their effective application, we enter a peculiarly atopical space of transformation, revaluation, and exchange, in which we are neither here nor there but always en route.* Disciplinary boundaries are dislocated too, so that readers of current criticism find themselves stranded between poetry and psychology, novels and political economy, drama and anthropology, or literary criticism and philosophy. This errancy has been variously castigated and celebrated, depending on how one takes the double genetive in lack of discipline: as the loss of a true framework or as the blind spot intrinsic to every point of view.

The metaphor of framing may in fact prove a useful way of setting forth the question of what critical theory is and how it is linked to the study of literature. Theory is a way of delimiting what qualifies as a poem or novel or play, of describing how it is built, what and how it signifies, and where it connects to what gets defined as outside the text (its author, tradition, and historical milieu). In this sense theory is always at work, however inadvertently, in the provision of such backgrounds as biography, genre, and socioeconomic matrix. Even aesthetic, formalist, and rhetorical criticism require a concept of art, an idea of the difference between form and matter, and a distinction between trope and reference before their practices can go forward. There really is no way to read a text in and for itself. Only a repetition of every word in its original sequence could represent the work in its purity, and even then, as Borges’s Pierre Menard learned, the act of writing and its local circumstances alter what the text signifies. Every critical reading, then, necessarily casts the work within another narrative: in a story of moral values, psychologies, societies, religious and philosophical truths, editorial procedures, political conflicts, or aesthetic techniques. Many have pointed out that the very quality of literariness, that essence we need in order to say what is or is not literature, depends on a framework of presuppositions that cannot (without going in circles) be construed as simply literary.

We can neither make theory a literary discipline, therefore, nor use literature to discipline theory, for their interdependence violates rules of order based on the demarcation of inside and outside, structure and content, or speculation and application. Each of the essays below employs one or more of the most recent, and controversial, frames for analysis, and so crosses over into the troublesome margin of contemporary criticism. As a group they represent no single school or technology of thought, but rather explore what is at stake in the determinations that create such institutions and instruments of analysis. In this they join a growing number of critical studies whose character resists any certain definition. Often these works take the undoing of traditional limits as their primary goal; in extreme cases we find critics like the late Paul de Man rigorously demonstrating the impossibility of interpretive decisions and thus condemning the reader to a perpetual state of suspended ignorance.² This array of books and articles, imported and domestic, drawing on a long list of nonliterary thinkers, was at first mistaken for an offering of new methods. In many studies the result was (and still is) the attempted transformation of theoretical discourse into an instrument for exegetical knowledge. Ideas, terms, and readings borrowed from outside the normal canon were to be internalized, disciplined, and made to serve the accepted purposes of professional academic literary study. Even in the preface to a recent anthology of poststructuralist essays we are reminded that theory is most useful insofar as it serves the criticism of specific works.³

But surely it is erroneous to begin by distinguishing theoretical work from textual analysis, especially without asking about the value placed on such loaded terms as service and use. We do not even know what a specific work is, at least not in any way that provides Archimedean leverage on questions of theory and practice. A recourse to common-sense notions of the object or of perception would only preempt investigation into how we make sense of the signs around us. Recognizing an object is an act of reading, an interpretation whose claims are not themselves objective but theoretical. Better to start by asking how we perform such readings, or what procedures we follow in constituting signs as things we deem useful.

Theory after all is not a device, like a compass or divining rod, that can be cast aside when the treasure is found. Sometimes, as John Barth remarks, the key to the treasure is the treasure. If works were indeed autonomous artifacts, writes Jonathan Culler, there might be nothing to do but to interpret each of them, but since they participate in a variety of systems—the conventions of literary genres, the logic of story and the teleologies of emplotment, the condensations and displacements of desire, the various discourses of knowledge that are found in a culture—critics can move through texts towards an understanding of the systems and semiotic processes which make them possible.⁴ One can move farther, however, as Culler himself has in arguing more recently that critical theory constitutes a heterogeneous genre whose practice ought to be recognized in its own right.⁵ The radical distinction between theory and the various types of practical criticism can then be productively dislocated by a consideration of the framing operations that inform all approaches to cultural works.

The work or object in question, be it poem, painting, historical event, social structure, or individual psychology, comes into being for us only in the application of a technology, a way for it to appear significantly, truthfully, against a determining background and within the determinate outlines of its own identity. The etymological link, notes Christopher Norris, "between ‘theory’ and ‘seeing’ (Greek thea = spectacle) becomes a forgotten or sublimated metaphor underlying the certitudes of science."⁶ Theory enables the critic to see Hamlet’s indecisiveness, the sexual politics in Jane Eyre, Faulkner’s sense of history, or the textual variants distinguishing the several versions of The Prelude. Such perceptive techniques are not merely implements used to manipulate already-given objects; as our epigraphs suggest, they are part of a general method for bringing things before us according to a principle of gathering and expression (techne + logos). Heidegger attempts to distinguish between a coercive modern technology that falsely fixes things in place and an ancient Greek mode of letting truth (aletheia) disclose itself. Derrida’s distinction between logocentrism and dissemination follows Heidegger’s lead, but it also denies that presence could come forth without the technologies of representation, writing, and textuality.

Considered as framing, then, theory is the operation that allows for representation, for the appearance of what practice is and what it understands. Yet in order for theory to work it must be repeatable or remarkable, capable not only of authorizing practice but of being represented itself. Now the operation that enables representation can of course be represented. But can it both ground representation and under-stand its own grounds in the same motion? Can the frame frame itself? No—unless it does so in that dizzying spectacle of reduplication epitomized by the pictorial device of the mise en abŷme. To make such a speculation into a science of metatheory would simply reify an infinite regression; one might as well call theory metapractice. The bankruptcy of metatheory takes place at the same limit as those of metalanguage or metacommentary, neither of which can close the hermeneutic circle to provide itself with an original basis. What we call theory and practice borrow from each other in an economy neither can comprehend.

Critical theories and interpretive frameworks are necessary but unpresentable ghosts of authority—prerequisites to presence that are themselves incapable of appearing except within the shadow of their own effects. This riddle has of course been the chief preoccupation of what has lately come to be called deconstruction. Whatever else it may be, deconstruction proceeds as a kind of endless worrying over what happens when you try to articulate the theory of theory. This is not a new question, nor is deconstruction the first discourse to pose it forcefully; rather it is one more instance of a dilemma intrinsic to our culture and its significant productions. The directions it takes today are avowedly overdetermined by its historical setting (witness the word deconstruction, itself calculated to interrupt a specific history whose major points of reference are Heideggerean destruction and French structuralism). If we take deconstruction as a way to reopen the relation between theory and practice in literary study, it is not in the misguided belief that its modern appearance will put an end to the history of metaphysics or of literature; we cite deconstruction here as an index to the dilemma of representation, not a dogma for its resolution. As a name for the effort to reinscribe the effaced operations that produce our apparent theories and practices, deconstruction suggests the kind of critical work that turns the frame of representation into an unhinged opening. Thus while not the explicit subject of most of the essays below, and not itself a method for literary study, deconstruction can serve as a frame or marginal justification for our own examination of the role of theory in the discourses of feminists, Marxists, historicists, rhetoricians, and literary historians.

At this point the skeptical reader might ask: Isn’t deconstruction just another frame-up? Aren’t such subversive critiques, outlining the truth about our illusions, always reducible either to nihilistic relativism or to a perverse return of absolutism? The answer, naturally, is yes and no, with a resolute care to entertain the possibilities of that and between mutually exclusive positions. When I try to decipher a text, responds Derrida, "I do not constantly ask myself if I will finish answering yes or no, as happens in France at determined periods of history, and generally on Sunday."⁷ This kind of deciphering must of course devise a frame and produce through practice a set of meaningful results. Yet it disassembles this framework in the very act of applying it, and so displaces the results of its reading into another, perhaps finally ungovernable, series of reframing perspectives. What should be emphasized here is that this maneuver does not simply negate the knowledge produced by a conceptual technology any more than it tries to synthesize contradictory conclusions within some total vision. Instead, both the theoretical framework and its practical application are strategically re-marked in affiliation with unforeseen networks of metaphors, cultural attitudes, and social institutions—just as words or other symbols gain new signifying determinations from the constellation of relations that traverse them when they are placed in different texts.

Deconstructive framing cannot, therefore, be offered as a representation of the truth about framing, since in practice it defers the question of its own essence. This is instructive for critical theory because it points toward the uncanny way that interpretive devices allow for truth and presence only in the moment of their own disappearance. In response to this dilemma, critical texts have increasingly become two-handed engines. A theory is proposed whose use in practice is either implied or demonstrated; at the same time, the theory of the theory is itself so scrutinized that its claims are unsettled and a different field of practice created. Such duplicity tends to disturb the either/or choices sanctioned by the canonical terms and methods of a given discipline, leading into the (supposedly) neutral borders, margins, and betweens that foreground conventional objects of study. In deconstruction, for example, a hierarchical opposition (speech/writing, presence/absence) is discerned and up-ended. Then, in order to avoid simply affirming or negating the structure of the classical dualism, the text disseminates a third term (différance, supplement, hymen, pharmakon, et al.) that cannot be synthesized or governed by the old conceptual scheme.⁸

Derrida’s reading of Kant, Hegel, and Heidegger, for example, follows the interlaced strands of aesthetics and metaphysics until they lead to just such a third term for the economy between art and philosophy: parergon. Kant introduces this archaic Greek term in order to discuss "ornamentation (parerga), i.e. what is only an adjunct, and not an intrinsic constituent in the complete representation of an object. A parergon, Derrida comments, is against, beside, and above and beyond the ergon, the work accomplished, the accomplishment of the work. Analysis detects here an entire series of oppositions crucial to both art and philosophy: form/matter, inside/outside, essence/accident, unity/incoherence. Derrida’s reading will once more demonstrate that what is translated as an ornament, hors d’oeuvre, remainder, or supplement" participates nonetheless in the very origin and production of the work itself. The parergon’s seeming detachment (aesthetic or otherwise) is never complete. Its interest in the work produced is both peripheral and essential; its operations, like those of theory, are apparent, yet difficult to discern:

The parergon is distinguished from both the ergon (the work) and the milieu; it is distinguished as a figure against a ground. But it is not distinguished in the same way as the work, which is also distinguished from a ground. The parergonal frame is distinguished from two grounds, but in relation to each of these, it disappears into the other. In relation to the work, which may function as its ground, it disappears into the wall and then, by degrees, into the general context. In relation to the general context, it disappears into the work. Always a form on a ground, the parergon is nevertheless a form which has traditionally been determined not by distinguishing itself, but by disappearing, sinking in, obliterating itself, dissolving just as it expends its greatest energy.⁹

This indeterminacy of theoretical grounds serves, on the other hand, as a split perspective from which to view the acts of understanding taking place between art and metaphysics: "If the parergon, this supplementary hors d’oeuvre, has something like the status of a philosophical concept in Kant’s text, then it must designate a general formal predicative structure which may be carried over, either intact or consistently deformed, reformed, to other fields, where new contents may be submitted to it."¹⁰ In Derrida’s hands, the parergon gets carried away. His reading shows that Kant’s text must elevate the ornamental and secondary term to the primary status of a general formal predicative structure. The argument that was supposed to delimit the thing-in-itself instead designates the priority of a para-thing. The universality Kant sought for philosophical concepts becomes, in the illustrative case of the parergon, the interminable displacement of fixed forms and contents.

Derrida calls this mode of analysis double writing, one stylus marking down the truth and the other tracing an opening at the very point of conclusion.¹¹ Double writing both participates in the frame-up and squeals on the perpetrators. Punning on this illogic of textual (re)folding—the pli that articulates the either-and-both structure of these strange third terms—one might say that framing always turns itself in. Of course not all critical theorists have adopted the specific procedures of deconstruction. But increasingly they follow a double itinerary that both inhabits a given framework and transgresses its limits. Each writer emerges from some recognizable discipline or discourse with the understanding that there can be no simple methodological step (pas de méthode) beyond it. All the tools and regulations of the system are required, since it is in their very applications, histories, and institutions that criticism finds what is lacking, and hence what requires its supplementary comments. However ironically, the theorist must repeat the flaws of the old school; repeat them not as an observer but as a participant, in the very work done to exhibit the flaw. The distinction between such a theorist and the largely mythical ordinary practitioner does not concern levels of awareness as regards their repetition of a particular flaw; it involves what steps are taken, and how effectively, to preclude one’s results from becoming yet another illusory closing of the gap.

By following the dictates of a given interpretive practice to its limits, then, criticism reactivates the contradictions whose presumed resolution constituted the theoretical bases for that practice. Fidelity to the canonical procedures themselves leads to a break, a coup, at a fundamental juncture in the theoretical apparatus. An effort to rethink the theory of the theory is precipitated by this break and goes to work altering the boundaries of subsequent analytic practice. In discussing the deconstructive approach to literary criticism, Derrida sets off the strategy of double reading and writing from the tradition of doubling commentary, the latter being defined as an effort (always necessary) to marshall textuality into understandable concepts. The double reader or writer seeks to exhibit the signifying structure informing such concepts, to display the unapparent writing that frames the book, the author, and the truth about