No More Learning

Not quite and not just. For in linking seeing to the must, the translators are making things far too easy for us and helping out Kant by turning him into something of a Schiller! That is, they in- troduce the figures of the poets, of the Augenschein, and of the ocean precisely as figures, as phenomenalizing tropes that can make the diffi- cult task easier: that is, having, "must-ing," as it were, to nevertheless find sublime, having to have the "faculty," as it were, of judgments of the sublime. In doing so, the trans-lators, as is their job, carry over and throw up a bridge where there isn't one in the Kant. In the Kant, what we must do is to be able to find sublime despite, whatever, the Augenschein shows, and the bridge between our must and our being able to find sublime is indeed a purely formal, only prosthetic bridge. This would mean, or, better, only mark or inscribe, that what the poets do is not even so much to see according to the Augenschein as to read an inscription, dismembered sentences, words, syllables, letters--like the illegible letter (or all too interpretable hieroglyph? ) of the arching line of the sky on top of the straight or squiggly line of the ocean. Indeed, it would perhaps not be too perverse to suspend Kant's sen- tence in the middle and identify the antecedent of "it" in "as the poets do it" as neither seeing nor being able to find sublime but rather "must": one must (only) as the poets must (nevertheless be able to find sublime) as one must as the poets must. (I've tried out the German: "Man muss bloss, wie die Dichter es tun, mu? ssen"; "Man muss mu? ssen"; "One, we, must must. ") Which amounts to saying that what one must do to be able to find sublime is, above all, introduce, inter-ject, "the poets" between the moral imperative and the sublime judgment. The supplying of the poets, as in Dichter or dictare--the only word that
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22 Andrzej Warminski
comes to mind, as it were--would be the always necessary and always impossible grammatical, gramma-tical, bridge, the bottom line of the prosaic materiality of the letter.
Postscriptum: On the Super-performative
The Triumph of Life warns us that nothing, whether deed, word, thought, or text, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows, or exists elsewhere, but only as a random event whose power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence. It also warns us why and how these events then have to be reintegrated in a historical and aesthetic system of recuperation that re- peats itself regardless of the exposure of its fallacy. 16
As is legible in several places, Paul de Man's title for what turned out to be his last book was Aesthetics, Rhetoric, Ideology. How and why the book ultimately came to be called Aesthetic Ideology is a long and, at times, comical story. In the end, and as always, the matter was de- cided by a combination of contingency and necessity: the "random event" of de Man's death and the (quite legitimate) preferences of "marketing" at the University of Minnesota Press. The difference be- tween the two titles, however, does invite a question: what difference would it make? Would the (re)insertion of the word rhetoric between aesthetics and ideology make any difference at all? Would it not be, at worst, trivial, and would it not, at best, merely reconfirm the suspicion or assumption that de Man's notions of ideology and of the political never get beyond the analysis of purely linguistic phenomena and their reduction to rhetorical structures?
Even beginning an answer to this question--and explaining the dif- ference that rhetoric makes--is not a simple task, but it is always worth noting that de Man was certainly very aware of the question and in response always maintains that "one could approach the prob- lems of ideology and by extension the problems of politics only on the basis of critical-linguistic analysis," which has to be done in its own terms, and that such analysis is "truer" to Marx's own procedures (for example and exemplarily, in The German Ideology) than what gener- ally passes for "critique of ideology. "17 Rather than repeating or sum- marizing arguments made elsewhere,18 let us instead focus on just one moment of de Man's project and his "critical-linguistic" readings--the moment when and the sense in which something, an event, an occur-
rence, something happens, something occurs and, as an event, is genu- inely historical with a "materiality" all its own. As always in the case of de Man, it turns out that rhetoric, the rhetoric of tropes, tropologi- cal systems and their attempt and inability to close themselves off, is what makes all the difference.
After de Man's readings--after reading tout court--what always happens and is thus predictable and inevitable (like death's "random event" and its inevitable reintegration and recuperation? ) is some ver- sion of the question "What now? " or "What next? "--"Now that we know the text is unreadable, its meaning indeterminate if not unde- cidable, what do we do? How do we take the next step, the step be- yond merely linguistic analysis of merely linguistic phenomena, to what really matters, to political stands and political programs and po- litical power, to what really matters out there, beyond the confines of text and language, to us? " This is, of course, the wrong question. And it is wrong not only because it presumes to know ahead of time what "language" and "linguistic" mean, as though the reference of these words were stable and knowable above and beyond all other words-- as though, in short, the referent of "language" and "linguistic" could be phenomenalized, could appear, as an object of consciousness and its phenomeno-logic without the inevitable interference of the rhetorical dimension of "language," without its being turned into a trope. It is the wrong question above all because it is (always already) inscribed within the workings of reading and de Man's "critical-linguistic" analy- ses, for these are precisely analyses of how it is that something can, does, happen, how the "next step" actually occurs. But a word of pre- caution is necessary here: those who have read de Man (even a little) should not anticipate too much, for de Man's next step, what actually occurs in (and as) de Man is not the performative, it is not the perfor- mative speech act or the "performative rhetoric" that seems to be the issue of so many of de Man's readings (from Allegories of Reading on) and their reception and use in the work of others. It is true that a cor- rect enough but ultimately untrue or at least not "true enough" ac- count of the typical "de Manian" reading and what it does with the re- lation between knowledge and act, the cognitive and the performative dimensions of a text--that is, trope and performative--would run as follows: de Man's readings start out by first setting up, reconstructing, the text as trope, as a tropological system (of substitutions and trans- formations of meaning)--or, most directly put, by interpreting the text as to be understood on the basis of (and as) a tropological system that
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24 Andrzej Warminski
would be closed, in the sense that its intelligibility is grounded in some ultimately stable meaning, an ultimately stable hermeneutic horizon of meaning. (In such a setup, the rhetoric of tropes would be continuous with, homogeneous with, logic--the possibility of universal and hence extratextual [and hence extralinguistic] meaning. ) All this means is: de Man begins by interpreting the meaning of the text, figuring out what the text means and how its figural language works to produce that meaning (once one takes even a small step beyond sheer literal- mindedness). De Man's readings, in this account, proceed by, second, demonstrating how it is that the text as tropological system, as system of tropes, in fact cannot close itself off and remains "open. " The rea- son this happens, most directly and succinctly put, is that the tropo- logical system of the text (i. e. , that is the text) cannot close itself off (in a final stable meaning) because that system cannot account for its own production, that is, cannot account for the inaugural act that put it into place in the first place in its own terms, that is, according to prin- ciples internal to itself as system. Hence, third, the text makes a sort of jump--it stutters, as it were--into another textual and linguistic model, that of the performative, of text as act, a model that diverges from the text as trope, as cognitive rhetoric, indeed, disrupts the cogni- tive dimension of the text. The upshot being that the text issues in the performative and that the text as performative disrupts the text as cog- nitive, as trope.
This account is correct enough, and many of de Man's readings-- from the early 1970s to the early 1980s--would seem to authorize it. For instance, the end of the famous (or infamous) concluding essay of Allegories of Reading--"Excuses (Confessions)"--would certainly seem to fit: "the linguistic model cannot be reduced to a mere system of tropes," writes de Man, since its "(negative) cognitions fail to make the performative function of the discourse predictable" (AR 300)19 and thus we find that "we are restating the disjunction of the performative from the cognitive" (AR 299-300). Or, for another example, one could adduce de Man's reading of the Kantian sublime in "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant": in the end, it turns out that the mathematical sublime is grounded not as a transcendental (or even a metaphysical) principle but rather as a "linguistic principle" whose model is that of a familiar metaphorico-metonymical tropological system which, because it (is purely formal and) cannot close itself off, issues in the dynamic sublime whose linguistic model is that of language as performative. Nevertheless, even a cursory look at what actually happens in de Man's
readings cannot help but notice that something else, something more difficult, is going on and that the account above is so partial and so se- lective as to constitute a misreading of de Man. Indeed, it is a misread- ing that leads to all kinds of predictable aberrations, in particular a certain inflation and overvaluation of the performative--as though one could go to the text as act directly, immediately, and while bypassing the moment in the reading when the text's tropological system gets reconstructed, in short, while bypassing the actual act of understand- ing the text, in other words, the text itself! In the case of de Man's reading of the Kantian sublime, for instance, the correct enough focus on the disjunction between trope and performative as the "linguistic principle" underneath the mathematical and dynamic sublimes over- looks one rather prominent fact: namely, de Man's reading of the mathematical and dynamic sublimes takes up only and exactly one- half of his essay! After a typographical break, the entire second half of "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant" is devoted to an attempt to identify whether and where the disruption or disarticulation at the cen- ter of the third Critique--between cognitive and performative and thus, by extension, between pure and practical reason ultimately-- "becomes apparent in the text . . . as the apparently tranquil, because entirely unreflected, juxtaposition of incompatibles" (AI 79). And such a moment occurs, according to de Man, in the uncanny "material vision" of the sky and the ocean "as the poets do it," a vision utterly devoid of reflection, internality, or mind, a purely formal "vision" re- ducible to the formal mathematization or geometrization of pure optics. This means, in short, that the radical "formal materialism" of Kant's text and its strange "materiality"--a "materiality," Derrida writes, "without materialism and even perhaps without matter"--as an event, an occurrence, what happens, is very explicitly not to be identified with the performative or the performative dimension or "model" of the text. Rather, whatever it is that happens in, and as, "Kant" hap- pens at the point of the "transition" or the "intersection" of the disarti- culation of two divergent systems, two divergent models, cognitive and performative.
The same is true of "Excuses (Confessions)" and its complicated reading of Rousseau. The fact that Rousseau's Confessions is not pri- marily a confessional text (i. e. , the overcoming of guilt and shame in the name of truth and thus "an epistemological use of language" [AR 279]), but also and rather a text of excuse (and thus "a complex in- stance of what [Austin] termed performative utterances" [281-82]),
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26 Andrzej Warminski
does not disrupt the text's intelligibility because both knowledge and action, cognitive and performative, are incorporated in "a general economy of human affectivity, in a theory of desire, repression, and self-analyzing discourse in which excuse and knowledge converge" (AR 287). Or, as de Man underlines, "Knowledge, morality, posses- sion, exposure, affectivity (shame as the synthesis of pleasure and pain), and the performative excuse are all ultimately part of one system that is epistemologically as well as ethically grounded and therefore avail- able as meaning, in the mode of understanding" (AR 287; emphasis added). In short, rather than interfering with or disrupting the figural logic of the text, the "performative excuse" confirms it and is in fact part of it. But what does disrupt this system because it is outside of, foreign and heterogeneous to, the system of intelligibility and under- standing is the radicalization of the excuse that takes place in Rousseau's utterly random, contingent, utterance of the name "Marion"--an ana- coluthon that "stands entirely out of the system of truth, virtue, and understanding (or of deceit, evil, and error) that gives meaning to the passage" (AR 289). It's this "foreign element," continues de Man, "that disrupts the meaning, the readability of the apologetic discourse, and reopens what the excuse seemed to have closed off" (AR 289-90). If this truly disruptive random utterance of the name "Marion" is still to be taken as an "excuse," then it would have to be an "excuse" in a way radically different from "the performative excuse" that was, ac- cording to de Man, still within the system of causes and effects, desires and repressions, hiding and revealing, and so on. And, in any case, it would not be its "performativity" that makes it foreign, radically exte- rior to and disruptive of the system of understanding. Or, if one still wants to speak of "performative" at all in relation to the random ut- terance "Marion," then one would have to think of it as something of a "super-performative"--that is, not one that functions within an es- tablished juridico-political system (within which it can come off or not), but rather one that itself is the inaugural act of positing that puts such a system into place in the first place. In any case, what disrupts the figural chain and the text as system of tropes is not the performa- tive dimension, not language as act, but rather the (impossible and yet necessary) moment of radical excuse, radical "fiction" (as de Man will call it after reading the Fourth Re^verie), at which two "systems" hetero- geneous to one another--like meaning and grammar--"intersect. " It's at the point of the intersection that the text as system of intelligibility and understanding gets disrupted. But, once this "textual event" hap-
pens, occurs, it inevitably gets disseminated throughout the text, all along the narrative line, and turns into a permanent parabasis that de Man, following Friedrich Schlegel, calls irony--"the systematic un- doing, in other words, of understanding" (AR 301). In other words, a certain radicalization of the disjunction or divergence between cog- nitive and performative, trope and performative, takes place in the course of de Man's reading--which suggests that already in the case of "the performative excuse" that would be continuous with and part of the system of intelligibility, there was (always already) a trace of the radicalized "performative," the pure positing power of language whose position--as in the case of the random utterance "Marion"-- as an "excuse" is radically disjunct from, has nothing to do with, the "excuse" as linked to the affective feeling of shame and the under- standing it makes possible.
That what happens is not the performative is very explicitly and di- rectly corroborated by de Man's remarks at the beginning of his spo- ken lecture "Kant and Schiller. " Using his Kant reading to articulate what he means by history as event, as occurrence, as what happens, de Man says that the model for such "historicity a priori" is
not the performative in itself . . . but the transition, the passage from a conception of language as a system, perhaps a closed system, of tropes, that totalizes itself as a series of transformations which can be reduced to tropological systems, and then the fact that you pass from that concep- tion of language to another conception of language in which language is no longer cognitive but in which language is performative. (AI 132)
And this is important enough for him to repeat it and insist on it: "and I insist on the necessity of this, so the model is not the performative, the model is the passage from trope to performative--this passage occurs always, and can only occur, by ways of an epistemological critique of trope" (AI 133). In other words, there is no passage, no occurrence, no event, no history--nothing happens--except as (or "by ways of") an epistemological critique of trope. What happens--if it happens--does so thanks to the (self-)critical power of the text as tropological system that would want to account for its own production (the only thing worth knowing, as de Man says at the end of "Excuses")20 in terms in- ternal to its system. Because the text cannot do this, cannot account for its own production, for the inaugural instituting act that put it into place, what happens instead is the "passage" to the performative, to lan- guage not as cognition but as act. In this emergence of a language of
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28 Andrzej Warminski
power out of a language of cognition, what emerges is in fact the very "origin" of the text, the material trace or the material inscription that would be the condition of possibility and the condition of impossibility of the text "itself. " In Kant's "Analytic of the Sublime" the attempt to ground the critical discourse, to found the very subject of the critical philosophy and transcendental method, instead un-grounds, un-founds, itself in the disarticulation of tropological and performative linguistic models by, ultimately, the "last" linguistic "model": the prosaic materi- ality of the letter, material inscription. In Rousseau's autobiographical project, the attempt to ground the confessional/apologetic discourse, to found the confessional subject, instead disarticulates itself and founders on the random utterance "Marion"--which, of course, is the material trace at the very "origin" of Rousseau's autobiography, the reason, as he says explicitly, for his writing the Confessions in the first place (i. e. , to confess the shameful act). 21 Among other things, such an account helps to put the performative into better perspective. For what happens when the text "passes" from trope to performative--which is not a tem- poral progression but an event, an occurrence (as in "comes to pass")-- is a certain "repetition" of the violent, groundless and ungrounded, in- augural act that, again, put it into place in the first place. The event of this repetition is what gets disseminated all along the narrative line and thus renders the text an allegory of its inability to account for its own production (an allegory of unreadability, to coin a phrase)--with Rousseau's autobiographer doomed to mindlessly, mechanically, repeat- ing "Marion" over and over again, and Kant's critical philosopher "I must be able to bridge pure reason and practical reason," "I must ex- hibit the ideas of reason," "I must be able to find sublime," "I must must," "Ich muss mu? ssen, muss mu? ssen, muss mu? ssen . . . "22
So: that's the difference the reinsertion of rhetoric between aesthetics and ideology makes. Without rhetoric, without the epistemological cri- tique of trope, as de Man puts it, nothing happens. There is no direct, immediate, royal road to the performative, to action and the act, po- litical or otherwise. Pretending that one can go to it directly is sheer delusion and a guarantee that nothing can happen, nothing will ever happen. 23
NOTES
1. It may be helpful to provide the passage from section 29 of Kant's third Critique that de Man reads in the second half of his "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant. " In Werner Pluhar's uncorrected (a point that is dicussed toward the end
of my essay) translation, it reads: "Therefore, when we call the sight of the starry sky sublime, we must not base our judgment upon any concepts of worlds that are inhabited by rational beings, and then [conceive of] the bright dots that we see oc- cupying the space above us as being these worlds' suns, moved in orbits prescribed for them with great purposiveness; but we must base our judgment regarding it merely on how we see it, as a vast vault encompassing everything, and merely under this presentation may we posit the sublimity that a pure aesthetic judgment attrib- utes to this object. In the same way, when we judge the sight of the ocean we must not do so on the basis of how we think it, enriched with all sorts of knowledge which we possess (but which is not contained in the direct intuition), e. g. , as a vast realm of aquatic creatures, or as the great reservoir supplying the water for the va- pors that impregnate the air with clouds for the benefit of the land, or again as an element that, while separating continents from one another, yet makes possible the greatest communication among them; for all such judgments will be teleological. Instead we must be able to view the ocean as poets do, merely in terms of what manifests itself to the eye--e. g. , if we observe it while it is calm, as a clear mirror of water bounded only by the sky; or, if it is turbulent, as being like an abyss threaten- ing to engulf everything--and yet find it sublime" (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar [Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987], 130).
2. All references to Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), will be indicated by AI fol- lowed by the page number. All references to de Man's "Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric," in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), will be indicated by RR followed by the page number.
3. See de Man's brief but packed reading of Saussure's ana-(and para- and hypo-)grams in "Hypogram and Inscription," in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 36-38.
4. De Man quotes Kant on the "savage" in the preceding sentence: "In a lesser- known passage from the Logic Kant speaks of 'a wild man who, from a distance, sees a house of which he does not know the use. He certainly observes the same ob- ject as does another, who knows it to be definitely built and arranged to serve as a dwelling for human beings. Yet in formal terms this knowledge of the selfsame ob- ject differs in both cases. For the first it is mere intuition [blosse Anschauung], for the other both intuition and concept'" (AI 81).
5. This is no doubt an overdetermined misquotation. See de Man's many texts on (faces in) Wordsworth now in The Rhetoric of Romanticism and Romanti- cism and Contemporary Criticism, ed. E. S. Burt, Kevin Newmark, and Andrzej Warminski (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). See also my "Facing Language: Wordsworth's First Poetic Spirits," Diacritics 17:4 (winter 1987): 18-31; reprinted in Romantic Revolutions, ed. Kenneth R. Johnston, Gilbert Chaitin, Karen Hanson, and Herbert Marks (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 26-49.
6. It is worth remembering that the "blank" between stanzas 1 and 2 of the Lucy poem and between parts 1 and 2 of "The Boy of Winander" marks the transi- tion from living Lucy and living Boy to dead Lucy and dead Boy. For de Man on "A Slumber Did My Spirit Heal," see his "The Rhetoric of Temporality," now in the
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30 Andrzej Warminski
second edition of Blindness and Insight (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 223-25. De Man's most extensive reading of "The Boy of Winander" is in his "Time and History in Wordsworth," in Romanticism and Contemporary Criticism, but see also the discussions in "Heaven and Earth in Wordsworth and Ho? lderlin" in the same volume and "Wordsworth and Ho? lderlin" in The Rhetoric of Romanticism.
7. For de Man on "Schillerizing" and "re-Kantizing," see "Kant and Schiller" in Aesthetic Ideology.
8. Although the reading of Kant's mathematical sublime in terms of such a subreptitious substitution--calling "sublime" what is in fact only "colossal"--is Derrida's (in "Le colossal," in La Ve? rite? en peinture [Paris: Flammarion, 1978], 136-68), de Man's own reading is very close to Derrida's here. That de Man had read Derrida's "Le colossal" is clear in the earlier "Kant's Materialism," also in Aesthetic Ideology.
9. On de Man's reading of Pascal's zero, see my Introduction, "Allegories of Reference," in Aesthetic Ideology, 1-33.
10. The locus classicus for understanding such "economies of the supplement" is, of course, Jacques Derrida, "La mythologie blanche," in Marges (Paris: Minuit, 1972). See also my reading of Derrida and catachresis as the "syntax of tropes" in "Prefatory Postscript: Interpretation and Reading," in Readings in Interpretation: Ho? lderlin, Hegel, Heidegger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), liv-lxi.
11. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 184.
12. And not just according to de Man. There are remarkable similarities be- tween de Man's understanding of the stakes of Kant's "Analytic of the Sublime" and Jean-Franc? ois Lyotard's. Indeed, however different their terms, de Man's and Lyotard's readings coincide in many respects. See Jean-Franc? ois Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1994).
13. Although he does not explicitly read the vaulted sky as a figure for the bridge between the supersensuous underlying nature and the supersensuous under- lying freedom, Derrida does link the ocean in this passage to the abyss between them. See La Ve? rite? en peinture, 148.
14. But whose phlegmaticity is then judged sublime in the Critique of Judgment! For more on de Man and the Dutchman, see "Kant's Materialism" in Aesthetic Ideology, 124-25. It is worth noting that de Man's joke in "Kant's Materialism" about Kant's characterization of the Dutch in the precritical text--"I have never felt more grateful for the hundred or so kilometers that separate Antwerp from Rotterdam" (AI 125)--undergoes a slight arithmetical transposition in the later "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant": "I have never felt more grateful for the fifty or so kilometers that separate the Flemish city of Antwerp from the Dutch city of Rotterdam" (AI 85; emphasis added). The Dutch--those "phlegmatized Germans"--seem to have moved closer to Antwerp by the time of the later essay!
15. J. H. Bernard's and Alexis Philonenko's translations are: Critique of Judg- ment (New York: Hafner Press, 1951), 110-11; Critique de la faculte? de juger (Paris: Vrin, 1984), 107.
16. Paul de Man, "Shelley Disfigured," in RR 122.
17. See Stefano Rosso's interview with de Man in Paul de Man, The Resistance to Theory, 121.
18. See my "Introduction: Allegories of Reference" to Aesthetic Ideology; "Ending Up/Taking Back (With Two Postscripts on Paul de Man's Historical Materialism," in Critical Encounters, ed. Cathy Caruth and Deborah Esch (New Brunswick, N. J. : Rutgers University Press, 1995), 11-41; and "'As the Poets Do It': On the Material Sublime" in this volume.
19. AR with a page number refers to Allegories of Reading (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).
20. See "Excuses": "we are restating the disjunction of the performative from the cognitive: any speech act produces an excess of cognition, but it can never hope to know the process of its own production (the only thing worth knowing)" (AR 299-300). It's worth noting that de Man here is restating the disjunction between performative and cognitive, which would support my contention that a radicaliza- tion of the performative takes place in the course of his reading.
21. Cf. "Excuses": "Rousseau singled out the episode of Marion and the ribbon as of particular affective significance, a truly primal scene of lie and deception strategically placed in the narrative and told with special panache. We are invited to believe that the episode was never revealed to anyone prior to the privileged reader of the Confessions 'and . . . that the desire to free myself, so to speak, from this weight has greatly contributed to my resolve to write my confessions. ' When Rousseau returns to the Confessions in the later Fourth Re^verie, he again singles out this same episode as a paradigmatic event, the core of his autobiographical nar- rative" (AR 278-79).
22. See the end of my "'As the Poets Do It': On the Material Sublime" in this volume.
23. In working on Georg Luka? cs's History and Class Consciousness, I was pleased to find that in Luka? cs too, what he calls "the next step," the step to action, to revolution if one likes, the step that is taken by the class consciousness of the proletariat, turns out in fact to be the passage to the step--indeed, the step to the step.
The action of the proletariat is the step to action. The step is the step to the step. That this "next step" emerges out of the system of bourgeois thought--that is, clas- sical German philosophy from Kant to Hegel--that is, out of the inability of the (tropological) system to close itself off, is an indication that the class consciousness of the proletariat and the action that is the step to action, for Luka? cs as for de Man, emerges out of an epistemological critique of trope--or, if you like, a rhetorical "deconstruction" of the tropological system that is bourgeois thought. See my forthcoming "Next Steps: Luka? cs, Jameson, Post-dialectics. " (That de Man's late work on the philosophical category of the aesthetic is at least somewhat informed by his 1960s reading of Luka? cs's early reflections on aesthetics is legible in his "Ludwig Binswanger and the Sublimation of the Self," in Blindness and Insight, es- pecially 41-44. )
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32
Art and Ideology: Althusser and de Man
Michael Sprinker
My title refers to a conceptual problematic with a long and complex heritage in Western philosophy. Given its classic formulation in the eighteenth century (most notably in Schiller's Aesthetic Letters), it has continued to trouble the theory and practice of art to the present day. For Marxism, it poses special difficulties, not least because of Marx's own tantalizingly brief comments on Greek art in the Introduction to the Grundrisse, where the problem of the relationship between the ideological and aesthetic dimensions is posed with great clarity, but left unresolved.
A somewhat less enigmatic account of the art/ideology relation ap- pears in Althusser's "Letter on Art in Reply to Andre? Daspre. " The passage in question has provoked a good deal of skeptical commentary (e. g. , from Terry Eagleton), but Althusser's formulation remains the necessary point of departure for any serious theory of art understood as a social practice with specific features distinguishing it from other social practices:
I believe that the peculiarity of art is "to make us see" (nous donner a` voir), "make us perceive," "make us feel" something which "alludes" to reality. . . . What art makes us see, and therefore gives to us in the form of "seeing," "perceiving" and "feeling" . . . is the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and to which it alludes. . . . Balzac and Solzhenitsyn give us a "view" of the ideology to which their work alludes and with which it is constantly fed, a view which presupposes a retreat, an internal distanciation from the very ideology from which their novels emerged. They make us "per-
ceive" . . . in some sense from the inside, by an internal distance, the very ideology in which they are held. 1
The burden of the passage (slightly, but not innocently truncated here) is to establish the special modality of art that distinguishes it from ide- ology. We need not tarry over the rather clumsy term allusion (faire allusion), which is meant to conjure up conventional (i. e. , non- Althusserian) theories of ideology as pure illusion, focusing instead on the more frequently deployed Althusserian concept of "internal distan- ciation" (une prise de distance inte? rieure). The passage, then, can be construed as a schematic effort to establish the necessary concept for a properly materialist theory of art, what may be called its particular modality, as distinct from the different modality of ideology (which, it will be recalled from the essay on Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs), also has a material existence).
In his later writings, Paul de Man came to focus on this same con- ceptual problematic, projecting a full-scale engagement with Marxism via a reading of The German Ideology (a work he did not live to com- plete). It would of course be perilous to predict the exact form de Man's reading would have assumed, particularly in the light of his own confession that "[w]hat will come out of it, I just do not know. "2 None- theless, I shall risk certain conjectures in the direction of de Man's un- finished engagement with Marxism, but in the appropriately critical spirit that de Man himself always exemplified. The long-awaited publi- cation of Aesthetic Ideology gives some grounds for speculating, how- ever tentatively, about the shape that engagement would probably have assumed. The points of entry, in any event, seem clear enough.
TROPOLOGICAL COERCION
In a decisive passage on the nature of tropes in the essay "Pascal's Alle- gory of Persuasion," de Man quotes Pascal on the relation between signs and things:
It is not the nature of these [indefinable] things which I declare to be known by all, but simply the relationship between the name and the thing, so that on hearing the expression time, all turn (or direct) the mind toward the same entity [tous portent la pense? e vers le me^me objet].
De Man then comments:
Here the word does not function as a sign or a name, as was the case in the nominal definition, but as a vector, a directional motion that is
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manifest only as a turn, since the target toward which it turns remains unknown. In other words, the sign has become a trope, a substitutive re- lationship that has to posit a meaning whose existence cannot be veri- fied, but that confers upon the sign an unavoidable signifying function. 3
It is the coercive but nonrational power of this operation that is signifi- cant. Tropes are perforce meaningful, but their meanings can never be equated with that which is true, in the sense of being rationally demon- strable or justifiable; they "posit a meaning whose existence cannot be verified. " And yet the tropological imperative is "unavoidable," the turn toward the same mental entity (in the Pascal passage "time") something that "all" (tous) are bound to perform. It would not be stretching a point to say that the account of the operation of tropes here contains in nuce the de Manian conception of ideology, which is a property of language, or more precisely, of the figural or tropological aspects of language that, pace Locke and a certain tendency in the Enlightenment, cannot be eliminated or controlled in any linguistic sci- ence, least of all in contemporary semiotics. 4 De Man's stipulative defi- nition of ideology as "the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism"5 restates what in many places he identifies as the seductively mystifying power of tropes, as in the classic instance of catachresis: referring to the legs of a table implicitly confers sentience on an inanimate object by attributing to it features of an ani- mate being. Or, to adopt a slightly different terminology, ideology can be defined as that which "represents the imaginary relationship of indi- viduals to their real conditions of existence. "6
Tropes or figures enforce an "imaginary relationship" to things; they, as it were, "interpellate individuals [e. g. , the table] as subjects [interpelle les individus en sujets]" (LP 170; SR 302). 7 And lest it be thought that I myself am engaged in an illicit transposition from one discursive regime to another, that the comparison between de Man on tropes and Althusser on ideology is an abuse of language, another tropological illusion,8 consider the following passage glossing the the- sis on interpellation just quoted:
As St. Paul admirably put it, it is in the "Logos," meaning in ideology, that we "live, move and have our being. " It follows that, for you and for me, the category of the subject is a primary "obviousness" [e? vi- dence] . . . : it is clear that you and I are subjects (free, ethical, etc. . . . ). Like all obviousnesses, including those that make a word "name a
thing" [de? signe une chose] or "have a meaning" [posse`de une significa- tion] (therefore including the obviousnesses of the "transparency" of language), this "obviousness" that you and I are subjects . . . is an ideo- logical effect, the elementary ideological effect. It is in effect in the very nature of ideology that it imposes (without appearing to do so, since these are "obviousnesses") obviousnesses as obviousnesses, which we cannot fail to recognize and before which we have the inevitable and natural reaction of crying out to ourselves (aloud or in the "silence of conscience"): "That's obvious! That's right! That's true! " (LP 171-72; SR 303-4; translation modified)
In the Pascal passage cited by de Man, moreover, the tropological power of language specifically constitutes (or interpellates) individuals as subjects--a universal subject in fact: "tous [all or everyone] portent la pense? e vers le me^me objet. " All hold the same object in thought (time); all respond to the call of this object and recognize it as the same thing, though this recognition be illusory, the necessary consequence of "the relationship between the name and the thing," rather than a true understanding of the nature of the thing itself.
THE PERFORMATIVE POWER OF IDEOLOGY
As it happens, Pascal also surfaces, somewhat unexpectedly, in the ISAs. Althusser's recourse to the Pascalian account of religious faith discloses yet another point of contact with de Man's conception of ide- ology. Referring to what he terms "Pascal's defensive 'dialectic,'" Althusser asserts the priority of actions (or, more technically, practices) over ideas in the functioning of ideology. He writes: "Pascal says more or less: 'Kneel down, move your lips in prayer, and you will believe'" (LP 168; SR 301). If ideology is produced by the irresistible tropologi- cal potential of language, which carries or directs thought (porte la pense? e) toward its object, it can be said to exercise a coercive power that moves individuals to act, even against what we conventionally term their will. The existence and the effectivity of ideology are ante- rior to and cannot be resisted by the individuals it hails as subjects. Of the individual so determined, Althusser asserts:
his ideas are his material actions inserted into material practices gov- erned [re? gle? es] by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive [rele`vent] the ideas of that subject. (LP 169; SR 301; emphasis in the original)
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Ideology is a performative; as such, it is not regulated according to a regime of truth and falsehood, but by its sheer power to move.
De Man exemplifies this ultimate performative power of ideology in his analysis of Pascal's famous Pense? e on justice and power, which con- cludes on an uncompromisingly Machiavellian note:
Justice is subject to dispute. Power [la force] is easily recognizable and without dispute. Thus it has been impossible to give power to justice, because power has contradicted justice and said that it is unjust, and said that it is itself just.
And thus, not being able to make the just strong, one has made the strong to be just. (AI 67)
Justice functions here in classical ideological fashion: it instances an imaginary relation to real conditions of existence. But it works, that is to say, it successfully appeals to and governs the actions of individuals, to the extent that it already possesses power. Justice is neither a con- cept nor an idea; it is a set of practices, as in the decisions of courts and the procedures that lawyers and judges are bound to observe--a seem- ingly paradoxical notion. The ideology of justice is an effect of the force of law. It is, to quote de Man once more, a "modal statement" that "perform[s] what [it] enunciate[s] regardless of considerations of truth and falsehood" (AI 68).
AESTHETIC ILLUSION
So much for ideology; what about art? In what sense can we say that art is material for de Man, and to what extent is de Man's materialism comparable (or not) to that of Althusser and the Marxist tradition more generally?
It will hardly come as a surprise to those familiar with de Man's corpus if I say at the outset that the term aesthetic is a complex one in the lexicon of de Man's later essays. It can refer, as the title of the posthumous collection Aesthetic Ideology indicates, to the protective, sheltering function of art, which allows us to experience as fiction what would threaten us in reality. De Man comments on this usage in his exegesis of Schiller's essay "Of the Sublime" ("Vom Erhabenen"): "one plays at danger as in a fiction or as in a play, but one is sheltered by the figurative status of the danger. It is the fact that the danger is made into a figure that shelters you from the immediacy of the danger" (AI 144). Nor is this aspect of the aesthetic alien to the Marxist theory of art. Marcuse's now generally neglected essay, "The Affirmative
Character of Culture," elaborates the compensatory function of aes- thetic pleasure with great lucidity. Even Luka? cs acknowledges this positive valorization of the noncritical aspects of art in his exegeses of Goethe and Schiller's aesthetic theory. But it may come as something of a surprise that Althusser, the notorious exponent of the ubiquity of ide- ology and the theoretician of antihumanism, would hold much the same view.
CATHARSIS AND CRITICISM
In a little-known text of 1968, "Sur Brecht et Marx," Althusser com- ments on the nature of aesthetic play, virtually repeating what de Man terms the protective or "sheltering" function of the aesthetic in the passage cited in the preceding section. Althusser insists on the essential role in theatrical presentation of what Schiller termed Schein, that is, illusion, or better, aesthetic illusion. But Althusser gives this common- place of aesthetic theory a slight twist that both acknowledges the comforting notion of aesthetic illusion and disrupts it at the same time, turning aesthetic illusion back upon itself in such a way as to provoke a rather different response from the audience than sheer comfort. Here is the passage, quoted in extenso, including the very un-Schillerian sen- tences that bring Althusser's essay to a close:
The theater is a catharsis, said Aristotle and Freud: art is a fictive tri- umph. Translation: a fictive triumph is a fictive risk. In the theater the spectator is given the pleasure of seeing fire played with, in order to be quite sure that there is no fire, or that the fire is not with him, but with others, in any event in order to be quite sure that the fire is not with him.
If we wish to know why the theater diverts, it is necessary to account for this type of very special pleasure: that of playing with fire absent any danger stipulated by this twofold clause: (1) it is a safe fire because it is on the stage, and because the play always extinguishes the fire, and (2) when there is fire, it is always at one's neighbor's. . . . [But] these neighbors, among whom there is the fire on the stage, are also, as luck would have it, in the theater hall. The humble, who behold the great in the hall respectfully, laugh at the great when the fire on stage affects them [the great], or else they [the humble] find that on the stage which is equally great with which to overcome the crises of their life and their conscience. (EPP 556; my translation)
Aesthetic presentation does more than provide a sheltering illusion (the catharsis attributed to Aristotle's and Freud's conceptions of art); it
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provokes action, presumably revolutionary action by the proletariat to overthrow the bourgeoisie. The aesthetic can serve a critical function as well, exploding the ideological illusion that shields the audience from real danger by promoting a consciousness of the play's fictionali- ty. 9 As at the end of Ken Loach's masterful portrayal of working-class oppression and resistance in the film Riff-Raff, the fire that consumes the building site on which the day laborers have been working and that has been started by two of them to avenge the sacking of another worker on the job--that fire is, for some who view the film, the one they themselves might ignite one day to bring down the structure of privilege and exploitation to which they currently submit. This critical function of the aesthetic, which Althusser (following Brecht) empha- sizes, is not so far from what de Man proposes is to be found in Kant and Hegel's philosophical reflections on art.
Art as critical reflection on ideology--this late de Manian motif is entirely in the spirit of the passage from Althusser's "Letter on Art" with which this essay began. Explicitly, art's critical reflection is said to produce knowledge, different in kind from scientific knowledge, but knowledge nonetheless. Brecht believed this as well, repeating again and again throughout his career that the purpose of his plays was to induce revolutionary consciousness in the proletariat, with the Lehrstu? cke plainly, but also with less programmatically "didactic" works such as Mahagonny and The Threepenny Opera. 10 The famous line from the latter, "Erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral," imparts a positive spin to Kant's suspicion of the necessarily seductive nature of aesthetic experience in promoting morality. As de Man puts the matter:
Morality and the aesthetic are both disinterested, but this disinterested- ness becomes necessarily polluted in aesthetic representation: the per- suasion that, by means of their very disinterestedness, moral and aes- thetic judgments are capable of achieving is necessarily linked, in the case of the aesthetic, with positively valorized sensory experiences [Brecht's Fressen]. The moral lesson of the aesthetic has to be conveyed by seductive means. (AI 84)
But this mistrust of the aesthetic--due in part, one imagines, to that Pietist heritage which made him notoriously among the most ascetic of men (one wonders if Kant ever took pleasure in anything)--is not the last word in Kant. 11
SEEING AS THE POETS DO IT
Alongside, and in contradiction to, Kant's critical evaluation of aes- thetic pleasure stands his injunction that, in order to experience the true sublimity of the ocean, "we must regard it as poets do [wie die Dichter es tun], merely by what the eye reveals [was der Augenschein zeigt],--if it is at rest, as a clear mirror of water only bounded by the heavens; if it is stormy, as an abyss threatening to overwhelm every- thing" (quoted from AI 80). De Man terms this seeing "as poets do" "pure aesthetic vision" (AI 82), and glosses the concept as follows:
In this mode of seeing, the eye is its own agent and not the specular echo of the sun. The sea is called a mirror, not because it is supposed to reflect anything, but to stress a flatness devoid of any suggestion of depth. In the same way and to the same extent that this vision is purely material, devoid of any reflexive or intellectual complication, it is also purely for- mal, devoid of any semantic depth and reducible to the formal mathe- matization or geometrization of pure optics. The critique of the aesthet- ic ends up, in Kant, in a formal materialism that runs counter to all values and characteristics associated with aesthetic experience, includ- ing the aesthetic experience of the beautiful and of the sublime as de- scribed by Kant and Hegel themselves. (AI 83)
The materiality of art, seeing "as poets do," is, if you will, anti-aesthetic. Its pure formality evacuates from the work of art any phenomenal con- tent. Kant's understanding of materialism in this passage is, by his own criterion (see the Introduction to the first Critique), empty, since it con- sists of concepts without percepts or intuitions (Anschauungen). 12
On first inspection, this formal materialism of the aesthetic would seem to have little if anything to do with Althusser's repeated emphasis on aesthetic illusion, or with the "sensory manifestation of the idea" (das sinnliche Scheinen der Idee) of Hegel's canonical definition. Art simply cannot do without some degree of phenomenalization, be it only the sparse lines and colors in a Mondrian painting, or the stutter- ing dialogue in a late Beckett play or story, or the dissonant sounds of atonal music. 13 And so one might speculate that Kant's materialism, as expounded by de Man, is not merely anti-aesthetic, but properly an- aesthetic, that is to say, it is nonart. 14
Althusser himself will hypothesize something similar in his celebra- tion of the late works of the Italian painter Leonardo Cremonini. Here, expounded at some length, is the crux of Althusser's position:
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In order to "see" Cremonini, and above all to talk about what he makes visible, we have to abandon the categories of the aesthetics of consump- tion: the gaze we need is different from that of desire for or disgust with "objects" [Brecht's Fressen]. Indeed, his whole strength as a figurative painter lies in the fact that he does not just "paint" "objects" . . . , nor "places" . . . , nor "times" or "moments" . . . Cremonini "paints" the relations which bind the objects, places, and times. Cremonini is a painter of abstraction. Not an abstract painter, "painting" an absent, pure possibility in a new form and matter, but a painter of the abstract, "painting" in a sense we will have to define, real relations (as relations they are necessarily abstract) between "men" and their "things," or rather, to give the term its stronger sense, between "things" and their "men. " (LP 230; EPP 574-75)
It is now possible to revise slightly the formulation given earlier concerning the constitutive phenomenalization in works of art. Art cannot do without materialization--in Cremonini's case, not only the color and texture of the paint itself, but the forms in which that matter appears in the paintings, what Althusser refers to later on as the "verticals" and "circles" that dominate Cremonini's mature works. But the "matter" of art, in Kant's poetic Augenschein and in Cremoni- ni's painting of abstraction, has nothing to do with the phenomenal forms in which it is made to appear--for example, in both Kant and Cremonini, the figure of the mirror. Such forms as the human figures that continue to populate Cremonini's paintings are not ideological, or, better said, to see the figures he paints as representing humanity is to reproduce the ideological illusion par excellence, what Althusser calls "humanism. "
The point is made most sharply in Althusser's commentary on Cremonini's deformed faces:
Strictly speaking, the deformation to which Cremonini subjects his faces is a determinate deformation, in that it does not replace one identity with another on the same face, does not give the faces one particular "expression" (of the soul, the subject) instead of another: it takes all ex- pression away from them, and with it, the ideological function which that expression ensures in the complicities of the humanist ideology of art. . . . Cremonini's human faces are such that they cannot be seen, i. e. identified as bearers of the ideological function of the expression of sub- jects. (LP 238-39; EPP 582-83)
The similarity to de Man's lapidary summary at the end of "Kant's Ma- terialism" is too striking not to notice:
The language of the poets therefore in no way partakes of mimesis, reflection, or even perception, in the sense which would allow a link between sense experience and understanding, between perception and apperception. Realism [in Althusser's version, "the humanist ideology of art"] postulates a phenomenalism of experience which is here being denied or ignored. Kant's looking at the world just as one sees it ("wie man ihn sieht") is an absolute, radical formalism that entertains no notion of reference or semiosis. (AI 128)
"Pure aesthetic vision," which de Man locates in Kant's exposition of the sublime, fails precisely to connect intuition with concept; it is blind, devoid of sensuous content, mute, equivalent to what Hegel termed "blosses Lesen," which he associated with the practice of read- ing silently--a perfectly legitimate practice, but inimical to poetry as art. At the limit, aesthetic materialization has nothing to do with the concept of art as "the sensory manifestation of the idea. "15
POLITICS AND HISTORY
That said, it would be incorrect directly to equate de Man's conception of materiality in art with Althusser's. For de Man stops just here, where the most interesting question arises: to wit, what effects are to be achieved by this rigorously antihumanist aesthetic practice? De Man often asserted that the aesthetic and the political are inextricably bound up with each other, but he never, so far as I'm aware, made good on this insight by showing how works of art produce their politi- cal effects. 16
One surmises that this reticence was at least in part due to a certain conception of history, well articulated by Andrzej Warminski. Quoting de Man on the coercive power of tropes over thought, Warminski writes: "The mind is bound to do this, not on account of any subjective choice--it is bound to do it. It's a linguistic necessity, the ideology built 'into' language . . . it's what is bound to happen. And that's history. "17 History is that which was "bound to happen"; it is governed by struc- tures as invariant and ineluctable as those that command linguistic tropes. Small wonder that de Man would invest so little energy in devel- oping his intuitions concerning the political and ideological effects of art: rigorous examination of the linguistic features of literature would,
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ex hypothesi, disclose the absolute limits imposed on action, limits that can only be ignored by further indulgence in ideological mystification. For Althusser, certainly, and one should add, for Marx as well (ca- nards about his so-called economic determinism notwithstanding), this strict insistence on historical necessity, on, as it were, the iron laws of the dialectic (to translate de Manian strictures into a familiar idiom), is anything but Marxist. On an Althusserian Marxist account, history is not the record of what "was bound to happen"; it is, rather, a series of contingent possibilities, what the early Althusser termed "over-
determined conjunctures. "
A single citation, among many that could be adduced in support of
this claim, underscores the point with great economy. It comes from a collection of interviews and letters dating from the late 1970s, when Althusser's grasp of the trajectory and the irreducible features of his project was probably surest. To the interviewer's query concerning the possibility of conceiving "another type of history," Althusser responds:
Yes, the German language presents us with another term: Geschichte, which does not designate a history completed at present, doubtless determined to a large extent by an already completed past, but only in part, since present, living history [l'histoire] is also open to an uncertain, unforeseen future, not yet completed and consequently aleatory. Living history only obeys a constant (not a law): the constant of class struggle. Marx did not employ the term "constant" that I borrowed from Le? vi- Strauss, but a genial expression: "tendential law," capable of inflecting (not contradicting) the primary tendential law, which means that a ten- dency does not possess the form or figure of a linear law, but that it can bifurcate under the effect of an encounter with another tendency and so forth to infinity. At each intersection, the tendency can take an unfore- seeable form, just because it is aleatory. 18
This is the very issue that Althusser tackles head-on at the end of the essay on Cremonini.
ART AS REVOLUTIONARY WEAPON
According to Althusser, Cremonini's "radical antihumanism" took him down the same road as
the great revolutionary, theoretical and political thinkers, the great mate- rialist thinkers who understood that the freedom of men is not achieved by the complacency of its ideological recognition [reconnaissance], but
by knowledge [connaissance] of the laws of their slavery, and that the "realization" of their concrete individuality is achieved by the analysis and mastery of the abstract relations which govern them. (LP 240-41; EPP 584; translation modified)
Althusser is unyielding (and currently rather unfashionable) on this point, as he had been in the "Letter on Art": art is on the side of knowledge, of science, not on the side of ideology, of which it gives a knowledge, however different in form from that which is given in sci- ence. On an Althusserian account, art provides a means by which to discover the true nature of the world, the structure of its social rela- tions, and the possibilities it holds for realizing human emancipation.
If this were the end of the matter, if materialist aesthetic practice were to be limited in its effects to this essentially critical function in re- lation to ideology, the charge Althusser offhandedly hurls at Brecht-- that "there is an aspect of the enlightener in Brecht, the theme of 'theater in a scientific age,' etc. " (EPP 553)--would double back on Althusser himself (although one should add that there are many worse fates than to be an enlightener).