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Material Events
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Material Events
PAUL DE MAN AND
THE AFTERLIFE OF THEORY
Tom Cohen Barbara Cohen J. Hillis Miller Andrzej Warminski Editors
? University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis -- London
"How Can I Deny That These Hands and This Body Are Mine? " first appeared in abbreviated form in Qui Parle 11, no. 1 (1998); the essay is reprinted here by permission of the author, Judith Butler.
"Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law" first appeared in a slightly longer form in Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 10 (1998): 549-74; the essay is reprinted by permission of the author, Barbara Johnson, and Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities.
Copyright 2001 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota "Phenomenality and Materiality in Ce? zanne" copyright T. J. Clark.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior writ- ten permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www. upress. umn. edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Material events : Paul de Man and the afterlife of theory / Tom Cohen . . . [et al. ], editors.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-8166-3613-3 (alk. paper) -- ISBN 0-8166-3614-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. De Man, Paul--Contributions in criticism. 2. Criticism--History--20th century. 3. Deconstruction. I. Cohen, Tom, 1953- II. Title.
PN75. D45 M38 2000 801'. 95'092 -- dc21
00-009996 The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
Contents
A "Materiality without Matter"?
Tom Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Barbara Cohen
vii
I. Ideologies of/and the Aesthetic
"As the Poets Do It": On the Material Sublime
Andrzej Warminski 3
Art and Ideology: Althusser and de Man
Michael Sprinker 32
Algebra and Allegory: Nonclassical Epistemology, Quantum Theory, and the Work of Paul de Man Arkady Plotnitsky
49
II. Deadly Apollo: "Phenomenality," Agency, the Sensorium
Phenomenality and Materiality in Ce? zanne
T. J. Clark 93
Political Thrillers: Hitchcock, de Man, and Secret Agency in the "Aesthetic State" Tom Cohen
114
Resistance in Theory
Laurence A. Rickels 153
III. Re-Marking "de Man"
Paul de Man as Allergen
J. Hillis Miller 183
Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law
Barbara Johnson 205
IV. The Mnemopolitical Event
The Politics of Rhetoric
Ernesto Laclau 229
How Can I Deny That These Hands and This Body Are Mine? Judith Butler
254
V. Materiality without Matter
Typewriter Ribbon:
Limited Ink (2) ("within such limits") Jacques Derrida
277
Contributors
361
Index
365
A "Materiality without Matter"?
Tom Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Barbara Cohen
Why de Man today? What if any claim might a project so linked to a "theory" that seems out of fashion--that is, rightly or not, to literary preoccupations and close reading--have in an era, say, moving beyond "cultural studies" to a reworking of technology, of technicity, of concert- ed political imaginaries and revived notions of materiality? Such ques- tions were deferred not only in the overdetermined violence of de Man's occlusion following discussions of the wartime journalism but in the ar- tificially delayed and seemingly untimely publication of the last essays, collected in Aesthetic Ideology (1996). Is it in these texts, primarily, that de Man moves away from preoccupations with tropological displace- ments to what perhaps precedes figuration itself, to inscription, a certain "materiality," the mnemonic, the historial "event"--or does it still an- ticipate that as work "to come"? What value is this most "literary" of microtextual projects to a time undergoing the transformations of the electronic archive and political and terrestrial impasses concerned with anything but textual reading (ecoterrestrial catastrophes, the homoge- nizations dictated by global capital, resurgent genocidal sidebars, the "University in ruins")? What, after all, has a riddle that haunts the his- tory of the "aesthetic"--and, for that matter, "materiality"--to do with world history or today's critical aporia? This would only be true, say, if the former were attempting in fact to access and alter the program and definition of the "human" itself, and the epistemo-aesthetic regime that shapes and participates in these "impasses" as well. 1 Here, on the far side of the era of "cultural studies," and at a time of increasing preoccu- pation with the politics of the (electronic) archive, with mnemotechnics and with the posthuman, is there again reason to ask this?
vii
viii Tom Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Barbara Cohen
What was de Man doing with "materiality" (what Derrida reminds us is a materiality without "matter"), with inscription, mnemotechnics, the "event"? One might address these late texts today not as relentless pursuits of the "linguistics of literariness," if we still have an ear for such a phrase, but as something pragmatic in the extreme. Here the terms necessary for any mnemotechnic intervention in the historial are examined, put in play, performatively tested? 2 At stake in de Man's late writings, we might say, is the gamble of a transformation within the conceptual programming of the historial, of agency and event, of the "human" (a preoccupation of these essays). 3 That presumed "pas- sage" seems linked to one of the older and more metaphysical terms in the tradition, to a redefinition of the "material. " Given the competing idioms, today, that would claim the term materialism in order to au- thorize themselves, what is at stake in this usage--this "materialism" without matter?
We will take the position for the sake of argument and because it is interesting to consider, that what remains unengaged in de Man's text addresses the possibility of intervention in the mnemonic, the pro- gramming of the "historial," and a treatment of "materiality" that compels a rethinking of technicity and the "sensorium" on the basis of inscription. Among other things it would be an approach, given the "materiality of inscription," to the notion of the "virtual" and toward a rendering virtual--and hence, toward alternative histories to those programmed by inherited regimes of definition and perception.
Of course, in referencing an other "materiality" to inscription, we are left with one that inverts the usual promise of the term that in- cludes in its genealogy the promise of reference, the irreducible real, the prefigural and nonlinguistic. Whatever inscription designates, it conjures sheer anteriority. It does not deliver us to any immediacy of reference, to any historical narrative that presumes to encode such, but to mnemonic programs that appear to precede and legislate these-- together, necessarily, with reading models, the "senses" for that matter, the "human" as fiction or category, perhaps the humanities as an insti- tution situated over (and against) a disturbance he finds within the "aesthetic" as routinely defined. The "materiality of inscription" as phrase invokes a prefigural domain, the domain of the event and the "performative. " To alter this domain, to intervene in the historial and thus allow for the possibility of alternative futures to those now pre- scribed entails a recasting (the figure of chance must remain a part of this calculation) of inscription. Behind de Man's relentless turn toward
inscription and away from "tropological systems" of substitution lies the rather banal but imponderably necessary task not only of the "trans- lator" but of the engineer. To alter the archive, the prerecordings out of which experience is projected and semantic economies policed is at issue (one term for this, in de Man, is the "aesthetic state," the manner in which hermeneutic and humanistic programs function in a repres- sively epistemo-political and statist fashion). De Man speaks here of a movement or passage that can go only in "one direction. " One cannot simply go back from having entered the problematics of inscription. This passage is, in Benjamin's terms, a one-way street, "irreversible. "
Perhaps one way of laying out or momentarily caricaturing this project for the sake of today's readership is as an appropriation and precision of Benjamin's own "materialistic historiography. " The last is one term or conceit that redistributes (and voids) the inherited uses of each term to designate how a rewriting of the archive stands to inter- vene in received narratives, with the aim of optioning alternative pasts, and hence futures. In the essays of Aesthetic Ideology there appears a rather open subtext that we are pointlessly warned not to be distracted by: an appropriation and effacement of Benjamin--darting, violent, dismissed, but marked. Most explicit in the one essay of de Man's overtly on Benjamin, significantly that on the "translation" essay, this is also heard in the recurrence of Benjaminian preoccupations to the point of being a kind of white noise ("shock," a movement "beyond" mourning, recurrent exploitation of terms such as passage, of course allegory and translation, and a use of "materiality" that is at least in- formed by Benjamin's "materialistic historiography"). 4 It may be use- ful to hypothesize for the moment, as one can do, that we see de Man as working out the means and mechanics of the sort of interventionist machine Benjamin proposed much too metaphorically and elliptically-- a fact responsible for traditional misappropriations of Benjamin-- under the term materialistic historiography in the Theses on History. If "materiality" as differently redeployed by Benjamin and de Man entails both a radical displacement of the term (most explicitly, for Benjamin, in Marxist tradition) and a strategic or nomadic reinscrip- tion, in both instances we witness not a "theorization" but a perfor- mative attempting to disperse a political-referential regime or archive that Benjamin terms historicism and that he allies, despite its intents, with what he terms epistemo-political "fascism. "5 De Man's perform- ances may be read perhaps as explorations in how such intervention in received programs of history prepares for and theorizes itself as an
A "Materiality without Matter"? ix
x Tom Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Barbara Cohen
event--associated with the mnemonic suspension or "shock" that Ben- jamin would, across his work, ally with allegory, caesura, translation, and cinema. Since, as Benjamin observes, the "past" must also be altered, anteriority itself reconfigured, the segue into de Man's interrogations of inscription and disinscription appear as other than supplementary. What is infrequently grasped about the violent rewriting of "allegory" in the hands of Benjamin and, very technically and obsessively, de Man--as with "materiality," undergoing semantic evisceration--is that it, allegory, is not redefined to function even as a sophisticated rep- resentational redescription of a reflexive system of "meanings," even if these include its own scene of production (however defined). Rather, it emerges from the katabasis of "literary history" and philosophical aes- thetics as a kind of technical apparatus that tracks and aims at a virtu- al disruption, and alteration, of anteriority itself. 6 It is a performative apparatus in the domain of inscription out of which, necessarily, vari- ous "futures" are projected as well. The powers accorded allegory in Benjamin migrate into other terms such as cinema, translation, or "materialistic historiography"--where this trajectory finds an ultimate articulation as a radical (re)programming of the (historial) archive out of which the "sensorium" would be alternatively produced. Thus de Man reads Hegel's remark in the Aesthetics that "art is a thing of the past" as in fact referencing the sheer anteriority of all inscription, all marking systems as a techne ? of writing. 7 Benjamin's figure of a histori- cally mutating "sensorium" is, again, given relentless precision in de Man's attribution of "phenomenality" to the domain of signification, and hence to inscriptions that program perception (which is to also say, the body, agency, the definition of the political, interpretation, and so on). What is not immediately apparent perhaps is that "aesthetic ideology" as a phrase in de Man's use circumscribes the domain of this encounter with memory, blending it with the politics of hermeneutic regimes and epistemo-aesthetic programming. Moreover, he does so by positing what might be termed a mnemotechnics. In Benjamin, the "monad" is the name for a site on the textual grid or switchboard at which such an intervention is possible, such an event, and de Man aims, it seems at times, at little more (except this is immense) than clearing the terms in which such a translation may be pursued perfor- matively, microtextually. Between the flaneur and the engineer some- thing occurs. 8
The term materiality in de Man's recitation conjures a locus through which sheer anteriority is in transit, both accessed and preceded as
the facticity of inscription out of which human perception forgetfully is staged. Since that is also in this model where "ideology" appears generated--that is, as a relapse and regression from the facticity of the event--de Man observes several things. Among them, that this "re- lapse" recurs routinely as an artificial humanization, effacement, and interpretive inversion of what the (textual) event performed--that is, everything that is associated with the parabolic figure of "Schiller" in the latter's reading and transposition of "Kant" ("Kant and Schiller"). However long this inversion persists in historical or academic terms, it does not amount to history so long as a reactive hermeneutic program legislates the terms of self-narration. 9 The "one direction" marked by the event--say, by what is implied by Kant's "materiality," as de Man calls it--is irreversible regardless of the evasive parenthesis marked by our inevitable Schillerian relapse, which testifies to it. That is, by the strategies of historicism, or identity politics, or cultural studies that evade the problematic and programming of inscription. What is fo- cused upon here is that which precedes and partakes of the very mnemotechnic site of archival politics out of which the categories of politics, the human, and the aesthetic appear organized, interest in which de Man's text shares with emergent concerns with "posthuman" technicity, the animal, and epistemo-political media today. From de Man's perspective, "aesthetic ideology" suggests not only how the traditional, marginalized construction of "the aesthetic"--dominant today still, certainly--is a model of ideology more generally, or that the latter is designed to conceal, among other things, that "aesthetics" (the word echoes the Greek aisthanumai, for perception) names an ancient problematic surrounding the phenomenalization of signifying orders. Our Schillerian attempts to return from the inscriptive order of mne- monic programming to rhetorics of historicism (a move away from the "performative"), of practicality (neopragmatism), of descriptive forms and empiricisms, or to retro-humanist appeals to representation, the subject (identity politics), or experience more generally (metaphorical work on the "body"), are examples of this relapse. If the domain of in- scription suggests a palpable horizon of the material and the real (a sort of magical "realism" with the virtual potential to alter the latter's program), the list of recent "pragmatic" turns reveals evasive idealisms of various sorts. 10 Their "ideological" signature, we might say, occurs when a model of reference is imposed upon the same conceptual space whose impulse is to fabricate an organizing ground or immediacy (the subject, experience, history) that effaces the problematic of inscription.
A "Materiality without Matter"? xi
xii Tom Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Barbara Cohen
Ideology is always mimetic ideology. Hence "ideology" as a term re- calls still the eidos and how visibility and "light" remain metaphysi- cally configured as guarantors--a promise monumentalized in the sphinx-like event called "the Enlightenment. " It is systematized in an aesthetico-political regime, an occlusion of the order of inscription (on this a certain definitional closure of the "human" depends) in favor of tropes guarding the claims of human immediacy and perception. This, suggests de Man, renders imperceptible the mistaking for percep- tion or phenomenality of a linguistic and mnemonically programmed effect. 11
The logics emanating from the phrase "phenomenality of the sign"-- which references perception to signification--name not only a secret that has organized, by repression and inversion, the marginalized field only recently (that is, in the last several centuries formalized under the concept of aesthetics). The "phenomenality of the sign" calls, as hy- pothesis, for a microtextual response, a mechanics of performative in- tervention at the site of prerecordings (to use a Burroughsian trope), of what precedes "anteriority" so encountered. Since inscription is per definition visible and public, the very site of phenomenalization, its logic precludes relapse into familiar models of interiority and content (or reference). It is the site of sheer exteriority and what cannot even be contained by that term. 12 This "materiality" without matter takes for granted a coming (and always the case) posthumanist and posthuman horizon by noting that the "human," as we constitute it, never quite existed other than as an epistemo-political phantasm, the alibi of the Schillerian relapse. If the economy of the "human" is enforced through a division from its others--various exclusions of gender, the animal, allomimetic agency and, de Man would say, history--the term post- human cannot be taken any more literally than postmodern or post- theory. We now see that, in de Man's confabulation, "irony" ceases to be a rhetorical trope and operates as a techne ? of suspension prepara- tory to the possibility of an event. Alternately a decoy figure such as prosopopoeia emerges not as a lyric trope, but as a techne ? for render- ing virtual all that a given historical arrangement of marks encodes as real, or "fact. " The precession of face or prosopos registers a preces- sion of the subject and of the contemporary models of reference. A rendering virtual of what is taken as fixed, as reified, as immediate, as "experience" from within an operation of disinscription.
De Man's work might no longer be caricatured as a "literary" diva- gation into the refinements of close-reading, since the latter becomes
the portal for a wide-ranging interrogation into how the "event" oper- ates in history, and what intervention in the order of inscription en- tails. By way of de Man's late work on "materiality" a project emerges that relates less to a "seventies" venture in theory than to still future and proactive investigations of and interventions in the hypertextual relay systems and programs out of which the "human" (and nonhuman) appears constituted, temporalization produced and managed, the "sensorium" altered, the virtuality of the present and the technicity of inscription brought to a point of passage or crossing.
This "one direction" or passage which de Man's text calls "irre- versible" is not inimical to a coming politics that may address less that of globalization than of the terrestrial and the nonhuman (species, re- sources, "life"). Perhaps. For the moment, this passage remains once virtual and already testified to. If in the early Hitchcock thrillers Britain served as the Schillerian or "aesthetic state," so that all the political villains aiming to undermine it were also stand-ins for Hitchcock's cinemallographic project, the knowledge de Man's text implies can be likened to that of Mr. Memory in The 39 Steps--a walk- ing allegory of a machine of inscription, whose memorized formula for a silent warplane he would cross the border with as if en route to an unnamed enemy state. Mr. Memory only records unembellished "facts," snapshots of information, which he can only repeat unaltered-- registered in the law of exteriorization13 which compels Memory to all too publicly explain his intrigue before the crowd at the Palladium when asked "What are 'the 39 steps'? " But that, too, is the title of the film: what Mr. Memory would bring across the border in a way that imperils the "aesthetic state" is a knowledge of being a machine of in- scription (like, and as, cinema). That this banality always was the case is marked by the film's opening invocation of Hesiod's Mnemosyne, whom Mr. Memory seems less a modernist revision of, that is, as though fallen from some interior pathos into an externally determined machine, than merely a figure who exposes his predecessor as always having been just this, which is to say, memory has always been this site of inscription without aura. The epic or sublime--if utterly banal-- formula is recited, and is nothing but unintelligible numbers and letters (what de Man calls "the materiality of the letter"). It is linked, none- theless, to sublime flight, the imperceptible or soundless flight of an attacking warplane. While the Schillerian audience would be expected to identify with the "state," with "home" or Britain, which of course always wins or seems to, the mystery of Memory's exteriorization had
A "Materiality without Matter"? xiii
xiv Tom Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Barbara Cohen
been outed from the beginning, from the first frame caught in its own material loop of repeated projections, from the moment a hand pays for entry into the Music Hall (spelled out, sequentially, in luminous letters).
This formulaic or McGuffinesque knowledge of "the materiality of inscription" wars with the "aesthetic state's" police and hermeneutic regimes. It does so, in every case and with Hitchcock's insignia, in the name of an alternative epistemo-political model to come. Mr. Memory, a performer in a music hall, in a low-mimetic Hall of the Muses, records "facts" voided of sense by their standardized or mechanical formality. It is through repetition that their mimetic pretense to be "facts" (pictures) is converted into signifying marks and remarks (Mr. Memory is called by his Impresario a "re-markable" man). What is interesting is not that Hitchcock's practice is the closest thing to what we might call a Benjaminian cinema, but that this crossing, this pas- sage of Mr. Memory as if "out" of Britain is both impossible (there is no enemy-other state) and yet presented in vaguely Mosaic terms as is echoed, perhaps, in the academically inflected name of Professor Jordan. What would Jordan, the site of crossing, profess? This pas- sage, which may also be that de Man calls from language as trope to "another conception of language" and the performative, aims at proj- ects getting under way in today's "posthuman" horizon. Moreover, it seems allied to political battles to come over the very definition of the "human" and the animal, of "life" and temporalization, of archival politics and mnemotechnics. Benjamin's recourse, at one point, to call- ing upon a "natural history" for a nonhuman perspective names a technicity operating within the "natural" which is not that of human history or its recent narration.
What, then, is the "afterlife" of theory--if this term does not name something contrasted to the practical, as it never did? There might be two competing histories that today's critical perspectives wrestle with here. The first is that which finds a "death of theory" to have preceded the repoliticization of critical interests and a supposed "return" to history, to all variety of identity politics, and to divergent definitions of cultural studies. What is interesting is not the implicit labeling of "theory" as the nonhuman, but the persistent reinstatement of a sort of humanism in many of the latter's defining projects. According to this narrative, there has been a more or less steady progress toward the light of a universalized critical practice, departing from a multipositional "cultural studies. " An alternative history is that a partial regression oc-
curs in many of these trajectories, a relapse, in a narrative anything but linear or progressive. Do the obvious limitations of these impending impasses, mimetic methodologies today, varieties of "relapse" if we are to take the domain of inscription as inescapable, return us to the utterly pragmatic "theorization" of the impasse in de Man?
We return to the opening question: is there a "program" present in Aesthetic Ideology, in "de Man," that is possible to read according to "today's" own needs and impasses? At a time when the untimely might feel at home, when the aporias not of theory but of mimetic, histori- cist, and cultural criticism are becoming transparent in all issues per- taining to institutional politics and agency, Material Events would pose this question. To do so, the present volume invited a variety of con- temporary critical writers usually associated with different domains-- Marxism and post-Marxism, law and gender studies, science and psychoanalysis, literary and visual and cinematic theory--to address how different discourses of "materiality" function, today, in relation (or nonrelation) to this preoccupation of the culminating essays of de Man. The title, Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, evokes the promise of this "other" reading of de Man's "mate- riality" and situates it as if in something called theory's "afterlife. " Readers are left to interpret this afterlife in numerous ways--as an identifiable period clocked almost to the death of de Man or as a rather anachronistic and presumptuous trope. The writers gathered in this volume represent an attempt, without any agenda, to explore whether de Man's "materiality" does or does not impact on or collude with various projects associated with the term materialism today. De Man's recent abjection in critical studies may not only have been an excep- tional way of marking and encrypting "theory" but evidence of polic- ing as well. Whether referenced to assaults on "de Man" following the revelation of the wartime journalism, the delay in publication itself, or the desire to contain the import of what de Man is addressing as in- scription, it marked an exceptional episode and lingers as a sort of black hole, numbness, or effaced trauma within literary and critical studies in America. If it is a tomb or crypt--like the meanings of "ma- teriality" itself--worth inspection, that would be less out of curiosity or nostalgia than for a continuing need of strategies to address impasses "today" in a posthuman(ist) epistemo-political landscape.
The originating germ of this project was Tom Cohen's idea that the publication in 1996 of Paul de Man's last posthumous book, Aesthetic
A "Materiality without Matter"? xv
xvi Tom Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Barbara Cohen
Ideology, might be the occasion of a conference and then a possible book on the role of de Man's work in present-day theory and practice. Enough time has perhaps passed, we thought, since the revelation of de Man's wartime writings to allow a balanced assessment of his legacy. More particularly, we asked the participants to respond in one way or another to what is perhaps the most enigmatic word in Aesthetic Ideology: materiality. We have used the word legacy twice. Nothing could be more overdetermined, unpredictable, nonlinear, and even mysterious than the notion of a writer's "legacy. " No one inherits de Man's work as one might inherit a watch from a deceased friend (or enemy). As Jacques Derrida comments in his essay in this volume, "As a possible legacy from what is above all an event, l'oeuvre [in this case Paul de Man's oeuvre, especially Aesthetic Ideology] has a virtual fu- ture only by surviving or cutting itself off from its presumed responsible signatory. It thereby supposes that a logic of the machine is in accor- dance, however improbable that may seem, with a logic of the event. " Just what Derrida means by "a logic of the machine" must be found out by reading his essay. What he says does not mean that de Man should not be posthumously held responsible for all he said, wrote, published, and did, but it does mean that what we make of de Man's work now, after the event, is our own responsibility. Just as a careful reader must conclude that de Man twisted the word materiality, anasemically, in a performative speech act, to name something different from the legacy of its previous meanings and uses, that is, to name, in Derrida's formu- lation, a "mechanistic materiality without materialism and even per- haps without matter," so each contributor to this volume has appropri- ated de Man's work in his or her own way, in an active intervention, or performative reading, that cannot be fully justified in the straight line of a verifiable cognitive, hermeneutic interpretation. What Derrida in Specters of Marx says of his relation to the Marxian heritage might be said of the strongest moments in all the essays in this volume in their relation to the "legacy" of de Man's work. Each is a "performative in- terpretation, . . . an interpretation that transforms the very thing it interprets. " Only such a faithful-unfaithful appropriation can be a re- sponsible reception of such a legacy. This means a diffusion of de Man's work in different and to some degree incompatible directions that con- stitutes the true "afterlife" of that work, sometimes by refusal of it or by radical disagreement with it. You can always refuse, for one reason or another, to accept the watch that has been bequeathed to you. "We" (meaning, at the least, all who work in humanistic study today) are not
just de Man's survivors. We are also, for better or for worse, his inheri- tors. Of course, you can always refuse an inheritance, sign a deposition that you do not want that watch, because it does not keep good time, is ugly or old-fashioned, or was already broken by the one who be- queathed it into a heap of unrelated useless pieces, or whatever.
Memory in The 39 Steps--a walk- ing allegory of a machine of inscription, whose memorized formula for a silent warplane he would cross the border with as if en route to an unnamed enemy state. Mr. Memory only records unembellished "facts," snapshots of information, which he can only repeat unaltered-- registered in the law of exteriorization13 which compels Memory to all too publicly explain his intrigue before the crowd at the Palladium when asked "What are 'the 39 steps'? " But that, too, is the title of the film: what Mr. Memory would bring across the border in a way that imperils the "aesthetic state" is a knowledge of being a machine of in- scription (like, and as, cinema). That this banality always was the case is marked by the film's opening invocation of Hesiod's Mnemosyne, whom Mr. Memory seems less a modernist revision of, that is, as though fallen from some interior pathos into an externally determined machine, than merely a figure who exposes his predecessor as always having been just this, which is to say, memory has always been this site of inscription without aura. The epic or sublime--if utterly banal-- formula is recited, and is nothing but unintelligible numbers and letters (what de Man calls "the materiality of the letter"). It is linked, none- theless, to sublime flight, the imperceptible or soundless flight of an attacking warplane. While the Schillerian audience would be expected to identify with the "state," with "home" or Britain, which of course always wins or seems to, the mystery of Memory's exteriorization had
A "Materiality without Matter"? xiii
xiv Tom Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Barbara Cohen
been outed from the beginning, from the first frame caught in its own material loop of repeated projections, from the moment a hand pays for entry into the Music Hall (spelled out, sequentially, in luminous letters).
This formulaic or McGuffinesque knowledge of "the materiality of inscription" wars with the "aesthetic state's" police and hermeneutic regimes. It does so, in every case and with Hitchcock's insignia, in the name of an alternative epistemo-political model to come. Mr. Memory, a performer in a music hall, in a low-mimetic Hall of the Muses, records "facts" voided of sense by their standardized or mechanical formality. It is through repetition that their mimetic pretense to be "facts" (pictures) is converted into signifying marks and remarks (Mr. Memory is called by his Impresario a "re-markable" man). What is interesting is not that Hitchcock's practice is the closest thing to what we might call a Benjaminian cinema, but that this crossing, this pas- sage of Mr. Memory as if "out" of Britain is both impossible (there is no enemy-other state) and yet presented in vaguely Mosaic terms as is echoed, perhaps, in the academically inflected name of Professor Jordan. What would Jordan, the site of crossing, profess? This pas- sage, which may also be that de Man calls from language as trope to "another conception of language" and the performative, aims at proj- ects getting under way in today's "posthuman" horizon. Moreover, it seems allied to political battles to come over the very definition of the "human" and the animal, of "life" and temporalization, of archival politics and mnemotechnics. Benjamin's recourse, at one point, to call- ing upon a "natural history" for a nonhuman perspective names a technicity operating within the "natural" which is not that of human history or its recent narration.
What, then, is the "afterlife" of theory--if this term does not name something contrasted to the practical, as it never did? There might be two competing histories that today's critical perspectives wrestle with here. The first is that which finds a "death of theory" to have preceded the repoliticization of critical interests and a supposed "return" to history, to all variety of identity politics, and to divergent definitions of cultural studies. What is interesting is not the implicit labeling of "theory" as the nonhuman, but the persistent reinstatement of a sort of humanism in many of the latter's defining projects. According to this narrative, there has been a more or less steady progress toward the light of a universalized critical practice, departing from a multipositional "cultural studies. " An alternative history is that a partial regression oc-
curs in many of these trajectories, a relapse, in a narrative anything but linear or progressive. Do the obvious limitations of these impending impasses, mimetic methodologies today, varieties of "relapse" if we are to take the domain of inscription as inescapable, return us to the utterly pragmatic "theorization" of the impasse in de Man?
We return to the opening question: is there a "program" present in Aesthetic Ideology, in "de Man," that is possible to read according to "today's" own needs and impasses? At a time when the untimely might feel at home, when the aporias not of theory but of mimetic, histori- cist, and cultural criticism are becoming transparent in all issues per- taining to institutional politics and agency, Material Events would pose this question. To do so, the present volume invited a variety of con- temporary critical writers usually associated with different domains-- Marxism and post-Marxism, law and gender studies, science and psychoanalysis, literary and visual and cinematic theory--to address how different discourses of "materiality" function, today, in relation (or nonrelation) to this preoccupation of the culminating essays of de Man. The title, Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, evokes the promise of this "other" reading of de Man's "mate- riality" and situates it as if in something called theory's "afterlife. " Readers are left to interpret this afterlife in numerous ways--as an identifiable period clocked almost to the death of de Man or as a rather anachronistic and presumptuous trope. The writers gathered in this volume represent an attempt, without any agenda, to explore whether de Man's "materiality" does or does not impact on or collude with various projects associated with the term materialism today. De Man's recent abjection in critical studies may not only have been an excep- tional way of marking and encrypting "theory" but evidence of polic- ing as well. Whether referenced to assaults on "de Man" following the revelation of the wartime journalism, the delay in publication itself, or the desire to contain the import of what de Man is addressing as in- scription, it marked an exceptional episode and lingers as a sort of black hole, numbness, or effaced trauma within literary and critical studies in America. If it is a tomb or crypt--like the meanings of "ma- teriality" itself--worth inspection, that would be less out of curiosity or nostalgia than for a continuing need of strategies to address impasses "today" in a posthuman(ist) epistemo-political landscape.
The originating germ of this project was Tom Cohen's idea that the publication in 1996 of Paul de Man's last posthumous book, Aesthetic
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Ideology, might be the occasion of a conference and then a possible book on the role of de Man's work in present-day theory and practice. Enough time has perhaps passed, we thought, since the revelation of de Man's wartime writings to allow a balanced assessment of his legacy. More particularly, we asked the participants to respond in one way or another to what is perhaps the most enigmatic word in Aesthetic Ideology: materiality. We have used the word legacy twice. Nothing could be more overdetermined, unpredictable, nonlinear, and even mysterious than the notion of a writer's "legacy. " No one inherits de Man's work as one might inherit a watch from a deceased friend (or enemy). As Jacques Derrida comments in his essay in this volume, "As a possible legacy from what is above all an event, l'oeuvre [in this case Paul de Man's oeuvre, especially Aesthetic Ideology] has a virtual fu- ture only by surviving or cutting itself off from its presumed responsible signatory. It thereby supposes that a logic of the machine is in accor- dance, however improbable that may seem, with a logic of the event. " Just what Derrida means by "a logic of the machine" must be found out by reading his essay. What he says does not mean that de Man should not be posthumously held responsible for all he said, wrote, published, and did, but it does mean that what we make of de Man's work now, after the event, is our own responsibility. Just as a careful reader must conclude that de Man twisted the word materiality, anasemically, in a performative speech act, to name something different from the legacy of its previous meanings and uses, that is, to name, in Derrida's formu- lation, a "mechanistic materiality without materialism and even per- haps without matter," so each contributor to this volume has appropri- ated de Man's work in his or her own way, in an active intervention, or performative reading, that cannot be fully justified in the straight line of a verifiable cognitive, hermeneutic interpretation. What Derrida in Specters of Marx says of his relation to the Marxian heritage might be said of the strongest moments in all the essays in this volume in their relation to the "legacy" of de Man's work. Each is a "performative in- terpretation, . . . an interpretation that transforms the very thing it interprets. " Only such a faithful-unfaithful appropriation can be a re- sponsible reception of such a legacy. This means a diffusion of de Man's work in different and to some degree incompatible directions that con- stitutes the true "afterlife" of that work, sometimes by refusal of it or by radical disagreement with it. You can always refuse, for one reason or another, to accept the watch that has been bequeathed to you. "We" (meaning, at the least, all who work in humanistic study today) are not
just de Man's survivors. We are also, for better or for worse, his inheri- tors. Of course, you can always refuse an inheritance, sign a deposition that you do not want that watch, because it does not keep good time, is ugly or old-fashioned, or was already broken by the one who be- queathed it into a heap of unrelated useless pieces, or whatever. 14
In spite of the diversity and heterogeneity of the essays included here, each does in one way or another at least touch on the question of what de Man might have meant by "materiality" and on how that might be appropriated for present uses. De Manian materiality is what might be called the "irreducibly other" within his thought. It would be invidious to try to characterize the various contributors as "Marxist," "feminist," "deconstructionist," "Gramscian," "psychoanalytic," "art- historical," and so on, since each of those terms is itself overdetermined and names a heterogeneous nontotality. It would also be absurd to try to summarize in this introduction each essay in a collection that is so rich and in which each essay has its particularity or singularity even in the context of other work by its author. The category names of the dif- ferent sections of this book (from "Ideologies of/and the Aesthetic" to "Materiality without Matter") are to some degree playful, or at least open-ended. The heterogeneity of the whole book is present within each section too, for example, in the gathering of T. J. Clark, Tom Cohen, and Laurence Rickels together under the rubric of "Deadly Apollo: 'Phenomenality,' Agency, the Sensorium. " Nevertheless, as we have said, each essay touches on de Manian "materiality" in one way or another.
The term materiality appears in three different, complex, and inter- related registers in de Man's late work: as the "materiality" involved in a certain way of seeing, a way de Man calls, following Kant, seeing "as the poets do it (wie die Dichter es tun)"; as "the materiality of the let- ter"; and as "the materiality of actual history. " One or another of these registers is reregistered, or more than one, in all of the essays here. Moreover, these versions of de Manian materiality are closely associat- ed with de Man's rethinking, in his last essays, of the relation between performative and constative language. Since each of the essays in this volume is exigent, sui generis, and complex, even what each says di- rectly or indirectly about de Manian "materiality" cannot be ade- quately encapsulated in a sentence or two. Much less can that be done with the whole argument of any of these essays. These introductory notes are an invitation to you, dear reader, to read each essay for your- self and to decide for yourself its import.
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xviii Tom Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Barbara Cohen
Andrzej Warminski's paper presents a detailed and authoritative reading of one crucial passage where the notion of materiality appears in de Man's work. This is the passage where de Man reads Kant on see- ing nature "as the poets do it" in "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant. " It might seem that Warminski's essay is simply subordinated to de Man's, focused on reading it accurately, but Warminski also here reads Kant for himself. Moreover, he has his own inimitable vocabu- lary and rhythm of exposition that makes his essay an appropriation of de Man for his own uses.
In Michael Sprinker's essay Althusser and de Man are juxtaposed and read side by side in relation to their ideas about art and ideology. Although "ideology" is the name both de Man and Althusser give to what it is in human perception and understanding that obscures a vi- sion of "materiality," in the end Sprinker sees Althusser as offering a program for positive political action that, according to Sprinker, was never worked out by de Man.
In an extremely rich and original essay, Arkady Plotnitsky juxtaposes de Man's essays, the nonclassical epistemology of twentieth-century quantum mechanics, and Romantic literature/philosophy (Kant, Shelley, Kleist, Blake). Plotnitsky employs each of these to read the others. He uses de Man, for example, as much to read quantum mechanics as he uses quantum mechanics as a new vocabulary for talking about de Man, Kant, or Shelley. A distinction between "formalism" and "formaliza- tion" is essential to Plotnitsky's essay, as is the claim that for de Man and Romanticism, as well as for quantum theory, individual events are irre- ducibly singular and lawless, only collectively (or phenomenally) lawful or ordered configurations. "Ultimately," writes Plotnitsky, speaking of all three of his juxtaposed subject matters, "every event, specific configu- ration, or historical trajectory will prove to be unique--irreducibly sin- gular and lawless. Or else each can always be nonclassically reconfig- ured as comprised of certain singular, lawless individual elements, on the one hand, and of certain lawful collectivities on the other. "
T. J. Clark's "Phenomenality and Materiality in Ce? zanne" takes its title from the title of the same de Man essay on Kant that is Warminski's focus. Clark's interest is not only in the materiality of can- vas and paint in Ce? zanne's work, but also in Ce? zanne's representation by way of "wedges and commas of color" of an interaction between phenomenality, prosopopoeia, and sheer materiality in Ce? zanne's paintings, especially Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Cha^teau Noir in the Edsel and Eleanor Ford House museum.
Tom Cohen's essay reads with subtle attention Hitchcock's films in the light of a penetrating understanding of de Manian "materiality. " Cohen, however, unlike most of the other contributors, is especially in- terested in what de Man called "the materiality of the letter" as it was manipulated in Hitchcock's films.
Laurence A. Rickels's "Resistance in Theory" finds de Manian ma- teriality in the concrete circumstances of the act of transference as it occurs, for example, on the analyst's couch. In the context of a fasci- nating account of the effect on psychoanalysis and on belief in com- munication with the dead of new technologies--telegraph, telephone, and, especially, the tape recorder--Rickels interprets from the per- spective of transference the only one of de Man's major essays whose original exists only on tape: "Kant and Schiller. " Transference is the key word in Rickels's essay. Since transference takes place during the "in-session materiality of analytic discourse," and since it escapes to some degree the theoretical formulations that would contain it, "transference" is, it could be argued, Rickels's name for what de Man calls "materiality. "
J. Hillis Miller's "Paul de Man as Allergen" seeks to identify those aspects of de Man's notions of materiality that arouse the most resis- tance in readers. His essay explains, at least tentatively and hypotheti- cally, why the resistance is so strong, why de Man is so allergenic to some readers.
Barbara Johnson's "Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law" returns to a de Man essay published prior to Aesthetic Ideology ("Anthro- pomorphism and Trope in the Lyric," in The Rhetoric of Romanticism [1984]) to investigate the problematic of personification in the law. In United States law, a group or association may be "counted as a juri- dical 'person' under the law. " Johnson recognizes, however, that "Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric" in its concluding sen- tences anticipates, in speaking of "the materiality of actual history," de Man's thought of materiality in the Aesthetic Ideology essays and at the same time uses an anthropomorphism of its own, as though an- thropomorphism were the one trope that cannot, at least by de Man, be expunged. "True 'mourning,'" says de Man, "is less deluded. "
Ernesto Laclau's "The Politics of Rhetoric" sets an astute under- standing of de Man's theory of tropological systems (especially focus- ing on "Pascal's Allegory of Persuasion" in Aesthetic Ideology) against his own Gramscian notion of what he calls "hegemony" as it may allow for emancipatory political action. Although Laclau does not
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make this point, it might be argued that the Pascalian "zero," in its es- cape from any tropological recuperation, a situation highlighted by de Man in his essay, and analogized by Laclau to the "contingent hege- monic articulations" that he sees as essential to emancipatory political action, is "another name" for what de Man calls "materiality. "
Judith Butler's name for materiality is "the body," also stressed, though in a different way, in Derrida's essay. In the context of a reading of Descartes's Meditations, somewhat against the grain of what she calls de Man's "literalization of the trope of performativity," Butler negoti- ates her own resolution of the conflict within contemporary feminism between constructivist and anticonstructivist notions of sexual differ- ence. Her presumption is that, somewhat as in the case of de Man's ma- teriality, "although the body depends on language to be known, the body also exceeds every possible linguistic effort of capture. "
Jacques Derrida's "Typewriter Ribbon: Limited Ink (2): ('within such limits')," finally, is a major reconfrontation of de Man's reading of Rousseau in Allegories of Reading and a major reconfrontation of Rousseau, Derrida's first extended one since Of Grammatology. Challenging and altering de Man's reading of the "purloined ribbon" episode in Rousseau's Confessions, while at the same time paying it homage as "an admirable reading, in fact a paradigmatic interpreta- tion of a text that it poses as paradigmatic," Derrida works toward a deeper understanding, if anything like understanding is in this case possible, of "what might be a thinking of machinistic materiality with- out materialism and even perhaps without matter. " Derrida concludes his essay by contradicting something de Man once wrote about Derrida: "He doesn't need Rousseau. He doesn't need anybody else. " To which Derrida replies: "De Man was wrong. I needed Paul de Man. " He needed him, we can be sure, to get on with his own work. This can be said of all of "us," not just about the authors of the essays in this volume. Whether we know it or not, or are willing to confess to it or not, we need Paul de Man to get on with our own work. The es- says here testify to some of the many ways a response to that need can be made.
With a few variations, most of these essays derive from papers origi- nally presented at the conference,15 announced to the prospective par- ticipants in a deliberately open, challenging, and paradoxical formula- tion: "Culture and Materiality: A post-millenarian conference--apropos of Paul de Man's Aesthetic Ideology--to consider trajectories for 'ma-
terialist' thought in the afterlife of theory, cultural studies, and Marxist critique. " At first glance, the conference site, the University of Cali- fornia's Davis campus, located in the heart of California's agricultural Central Valley and founded as the "University Farm" of the University of California system in 1908, is a long distance from Paul de Man's-- and theory's--Yale/East Coast roots. However, the conference was never intended as a retrospective, but, as earlier stated, a "postmillenarian" focus on the afterlife of de Man and of theory. Although East to West Coast may not be what first leaps to mind, visions of afterlife tend to evoke geographic, as well as temporal, relocations, and Paul de Man's afterlife in Davis, if fleeting (April 23-25, 1998), was antecedent to more serious thoughts of a theoretical afterlife in the conference pa- pers. Further, as perceptions of the West as frontier territory removed from the Eastern establishment still linger, it seems fitting that a confer- ence with its eye to the future be situated in a western city. In fact, al- most half of the two hundred to four hundred attendees (the number varied daily) were students and junior faculty from relatively small and isolated California, Oregon, and Washington colleges and universities, for whom this particular assemblage of critics was a stated first. In his essay, Jacques Derrida underscores the re-location, or travel, from East Coast theoretical roots to this conference when he refers in his essay to himself, Carla Freccero, and Hillis Miller as "three immigrants from Yale. " Not only the West Coast (of the United States), but the West, still faces the endangered frontier of an uncertain future or afterlife.
Derrida also refers in his essay to the conference poster which he calls a "jeu de l'oie for a Californian science fiction (a French board game that is . . . a cross between Chinese checkers and Monopoly). " The focus of the poster is a tarot card that itself represents the travel "theme. " Although not specifically centered on travel to the West, in this case California, as suggested by Derrida, most viewers assumed it a California piece, perhaps because of its psychedelic, or 1960s, quali- ty often associated with northern California. 16 Named "Chariot," its palette of disquieting blues, oranges, and yellows draws one into a phantasmal hodgepodge of travel icons. An airport runway at the card's bottom center leads the eye to an ancient shield inscribed with horse and chariot. At the card's center is a Roman bust, one of its eyes manifested as a hollow of flame, and head adorned with the victor's symbol of the laurel wreath. Around the perimeter are a me? - lange of travel/transportation images--rocket ship; hot-air balloon; moon-landing shuttle; falcon poised for flight; superhighway; and the
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diaphanous figure of a surfer--while the card's extreme left reveals a contemporary male face reflected in a rearview mirror. In sum, a travel card of time and place juxtaposing past, present, and future in a whirl of images, some more discernible than others--a "trip" in itself.
We are grateful to many for their contributions to both the confer- ence and this volume. For the conference, we thank the University of California Humanities Research Institute and the Office of the President, the UCI Humanities Center, and the UC Davis Humanities Center, Critical Theory Institute, and Dean of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies for their important conference support. The UCI Humanities Center generously extended its support to the volume as well. We are indebted to Georges Van Den Abbeele as the guiding spirit behind much of this funding and as our gracious conference host. Ron Saufley helped us successfully manage the conference with his enthusiastic and logistical guidance. The tireless energy, valuable insights, and conscien- tious attentiveness to detail of Brook Haley, Jessica Haile, Erin Ferris, Jim Zeigler, Francie Krebs, and their fellow UCI graduate students transformed the conference from concept to event. We would like to thank Carla Freccero, Ned Lukacher, Mark Poster, and again Georges Van Den Abbeele for their provocative conference papers, and Fred Jameson, whose presence illumined many discussions. For this volume, we thank Geoffrey Manaugh for his diligent and timely work on the index, and Doug Armato, Gretchen Asmussen, Mike Stoffel, and David Thorstad at the University of Minnesota Press for their unfailing pa- tience and professionalism.
We remember with warmth and admiration Michael Sprinker, whose death too soon followed his contribution to Material Events. His esprit-- intellectual and personal--was his hallmark, which we find stamped on both conference and volume.
NOTES
1. After the Schillerian adjustment of Kant, de Man observes: "The human, the needs of the human, the necessities of the human are absolute and are not open to critical attack. . . . The human is defined as a certain principle of closure which is no longer accessible to rational critical analysis" (Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996], 150-51; hereafter AI). And: "there is entirely ignored the possibility of a language that would not be definable in human terms, and that would not be accessible to the human will at all--none--of a language that would to some extent not be--in a very radical sense, not be human. So that we would at least have a complication, an initial com- plication, in which the principle of closure is not the human--because language can
always undo that principle of closure--and is not language either, because language is not a firm concept, is not a concept of an entity which allows itself to be concep- tualized and reified in any way" (AI 151-52).
2. For de Man the "epistemological critique of tropes," as he calls the bracket- ing of totalized systems of substitution or metaphoric thought, is the premise for, if itself preparatory to, epistemo-political intervention. It precipitates what is called a movement, passage, or translation: "And this passage, if it is thus conceived, that is, the passage from trope to performative--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 way of an epistemological cri- tique of trope. . . . [Here] certain linguistic elements will remain which the concept of trope cannot reach, and which then can be, for example--though there are other possibilities--performative. That process . . . is irreversible. That goes in that direc- tion and you cannot get back from the one to the one before" ("Kant and Schiller," in AI 133).
3. De Man will observe in his discussion of Benjamin's essay "Translation" in The Resistance to Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), hereafter RT: "there is, in a very radical sense, no such thing as the human" (96).
4. The encounter between de Man and Benjamin, Benjamin as "hypogram," is also a subtext of de Man's "Anthropomorphism and Trope in Lyric," in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 239-62; hereafter RR). We might posit that the relation of Baudelaire's text "Obsession" to "Correspondances"--referenced by Benjamin's theorization of allegory--touches on de Man's reading of Benjamin (259-60).
5. De Man, in "Shelley Disfigured," speaks generically of "the recuperative and nihilistic allegories of historicism" (RR 122; emphasis added).
6. Allegory reaches into the scene of pre-inscription with the power to reflex- ively alter that program, a memory or referential system's own "past. " As Benjamin puts it in the Trauerspiel: "(Allegory) means precisely the non-existence of what it (re)presents" [Und zwar bedeutet es genau das Nichtsein dessen, was es vorstellt]. " See Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: NLB, 1977), 233; Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1963), 265.
7. "Sign and Symbol in Hegel's Aesthetics": "The art, the techne ? , of writing which cannot be separated from thought and from memorization can only be pre- served in the figural mode of the symbol, the very mode it has to do away with if it is to occur at all" (AI 102).
8.