No More Learning

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. 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.
A "Materiality without Matter"? xvii
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
A "Materiality without Matter"? xix
xx Tom Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Barbara Cohen
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
A "Materiality without Matter"? xxi
xxii Tom Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Barbara Cohen
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. In the historical conceptualization and institutionalization of the "aesthet- ic"--whose symptoms pervade the "crises" of the humanities in academia today-- de Man believes he has located, in Benjaminian terms, a master-monad whose al- teration brings with it shudders and alteration throughout the transtemporal switchboard.
9. "[T]he regression from the event, from the materiality of the inscribed signi- fier in Kant, . . . is no longer historical, because that regression takes place in a tem- poral mode and it is as such not history. One could say, for example, that . . . in the whole reception of Kant from then until now, nothing has happened, only regression, nothing has happened at all" (AI 134). Since this relapse is constitutive not only of
A "Materiality without Matter"?
xxiii
xxiv Tom Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Barbara Cohen
hermeneutics generally but functional and programmatizable communities, missing in de Man is any calculation of how this inversion may be constitutive of reference and the programming of perception within a socio-aesthetic analysis.
10. De Man: "The important thing is that this apparent realism, this apparent practicality, this concern with the practical, will result in a total loss of contact with reality, in a total idealism" (AI 142).
11. This "materiality" is so effaced that to think with it or in its direction is it- self to risk sanctions: "if you ever try to do something in the other direction and you touch on it you'll see what will happen to you" (AI 142).
12. Of Hegel we are told symptomatically: "In order to have memory one has to be able to forget remembrance and reach the machinelike exteriority, the out- ward turn, which is retained in the German word for learning by heart, aus-wendig lernen" (AI 102). This leads to the retirement of the figure itself: "The spatial metaphor of exteriority (A? usserlichkeit) is not adequate to describe the knowledge that follows from the experience of the sublime. The sublime, it turns out, is self-de- stroying in a manner without precedent at any of the other stages of the dialectic" (AI 116).
13. De Man: "This Gesetz der A? usserlichkeit implies that the principle of signifi- cation is now itself no longer animated by the tensions between its dual poles, but that it is reduced to the preordained motion of its own position. As such, it is no longer a sign-producing function (which is how Hegel valorized the sign in the Encyclopedia), but the quotation or repetition of a previously established semiosis. Neither is it a trope, for it cannot be closed off or replaced by the knowledge of its reduced condition" (AI 116).
14. The example is J. L. Austin's, near the beginning of How to Do Things with Words, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975), 5: "'I give and be- queath my watch to my brother'--as occurring in a will. " Later Austin recognizes that this act of bequeathing may be in various ways "infelicitous": "it is hardly a gift if I say 'I give it to you' but never hand it over" (9). Among Austin's examples of "the type of infelicity which we have called Misapplications," with a characteristic Shakespearean allusion, is "'I give,' said when it is not mine to give or when it is a pound of my living and non-detached flesh" (34). Were the readings de Man per- formed his to give and bequeath to us, his inheritors? That is a knotty and perhaps undecidable question, especially in the light of what de Man had to say of the machinal and of the way, in reading, what happens is what is bound to take place. As for the watch broken into a thousand unrelated pieces, so that time is put out of joint, see what de Man says in the last paragraph of "Shelley Disfigured": "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 ex- ists 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 repeats itself regardless of the exposure of its fallacy" (RR 122).
15. Of the essays included in this volume, Barbara Johnson's is the only one not delivered at the conference. In addition to the essays herein, our generous Davis host, Georges Van Den Abbeele, as well as Ned Lukacher, Carla Freccero, and Mark Poster, presented papers of significant contribution to the conference.
16. Indeed, the tarot card publisher is a northern California group (Julie King/Merrill-West Publishing, Carmel, California). We think the illustrator (Ken Kenutson) is a local California artist, but we have not succeeded in our attempts to reach this group and wonder if they are off on their own travels. However, the poster designer, Roger Gordon, is, we know, well grounded in southern California.
A "Materiality without Matter"? xxv
This page intentionally left blank
I. Ideologies of/and the Aesthetic
This page intentionally left blank
"As the Poets Do It": On the Material Sublime
Andrzej Warminski
The entrance of "the poets" onto the scene of Kant's attempt to ground aesthetic reflexive judgments of the sublime as a transcendental prin- ciple--in his phrase "as the poets do it" (wie die Dichter es tun)--could hardly be more peculiar and more enigmatic. 1 Paul de Man's reading of this moment in the third Critique is no less enigmatic and, if any- thing, even more peculiar, not least of all because the vision of the ocean "as the poets do it"--"merely by what appears to the eye" (bloss . . . nach dem, was der Augenschein zeigt--"merely according to what the appearance to the eye shows," to put it more "literally," or "according to what meets the eye")--is termed by him a "material vi- sion" whose "materiality" is linked to what de Man calls Kant's "ma- terialism" (or "formal materialism"): "The critique of the aesthetic," he writes, "ends up, in Kant, in a formal materialism that runs counter to all values and characteristics associated with aesthetic experience, including the aesthetic experience of the beautiful and of the sublime as described by Kant and Hegel themselves" (AI 83). 2 That it might be better not to assume anything about our understanding of de Man's difficult "materiality" and "materialism" is certainly confirmed by the way the term gets introduced in "Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant. " After characterizing the architectonic vision of the heavens and the ocean--"The heavens are a vault that covers the totality of earthly space as a roof covers a house," writes de Man--as being neither "a trope or a symbol" nor "literal, which would imply its possible figurali- zation or symbolization by an act of judgment," de Man writes that "The only word that comes to mind is that of a material vision, but how this materiality is then to be understood in linguistic terms is not,
3
4 Andrzej Warminski
as yet, clearly intelligible" (AI 82). Since "material" is a word, the only word, that comes to mind here, one can already suspect that its intel- ligibility will indeed have a lot to do with its being understood "in linguistic terms. " We will get to those terms soon enough, but it is al- ready worth remarking that the word material is one that merely "comes to mind," as though on account of the lack of a word, the proper word, to designate the peculiarly unfamiliar nature of this vi- sion. I say "unfamiliar" advisedly, for de Man goes to some pains-- both before and after the word that comes to mind--to explain at length what this material vision is not and is not like. It is a vision en- tirely devoid of teleological interference, it is not a metamorphosis, not a trope or a symbol, heavens and ocean as building are a priori, previ- ous to any understanding, to any exchange or anthropomorphism, there is no room for address in Kant's flat third-person world, this vi- sion of the natural world is in no way solar, it is not the sudden discov- ery of a true world as an unveiling, as the a-letheia of Heidegger's Lichtung, "we are not to think of the stars as suns moving in circles," nor are we to think of them as the constellation that survives at the apocalyptic end of Mallarme? 's Coup de De? s, and so on. The list of what this vision and its materiality are not (and are not like) could be extended; as de Man says, "It is easier to say what the [Kant] passage excludes and how it is different from others than to say what it is. " Indeed, since "no mind is involved in the Kantian vision of ocean and heaven," it is no wonder that the only word to characterize it (appar- ently) nonnegatively can only "come to mind"--as though "by acci- dent," as one says, no doubt simultaneously utterly random and yet completely determined, that is, overdetermined like the nightmarish hypograms of Ferdinand de Saussure. 3
But what is most striking (for the "mind" or the "eye" or whatever) about de Man's elegiac-sounding and yet nonelegiac enumeration of what the poets' material vision of heaven and ocean is not and not like is his going out of his way to insist that it is not like the poet Wordsworth's, for example, apparently similar intuitions in passages like the nest-robbing episode of The Prelude where the destabilized sky is nevertheless still a sheltering sky. "Kant's passage is not like this," asserts de Man, "because the sky does not appear in it as associated in any way with shelter. " Dwelling poetically in Kant's architectonic world would seem to mean precisely not dwelling in the building con- structed of heavens and ocean when it is seen merely as the poets do it, according to what the Augenschein shows:
The poet who sees the heavens as a vault is clearly like the savage [in Kant's Logic],4 and unlike Wordsworth. He does not see prior to dwelling, but merely sees. He does not see in order to shelter himself, for there is no suggestion made that he could in any way be threatened, not even by the storm--since it is pointed out that he remains safely on the shore. The link between seeing and dwelling, sehen and wohnen, is teleological and therefore absent in pure aesthetic vision. (AI 81)
Nor, de Man insists, is the Kantian vision like the "sense sublime" in the famous passage of Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," which is "an instance of the constant exchange between mind and nature, of the chi- asmic transfer of properties between the sensory and the intellectual world that characterizes [Wordsworth's] figural diction. " No mind being involved in the Kantian vision, "to the extent that any mind, any judgment intervenes, it is in error. " And since Kant's architectonic world is not a metamorphosis, not a trope, not a symbol, and prior to any exchange or anthropomorphism, it cannot be addressed the way the poet Wordsworth does it in book 5 of The Prelude as "the speaking face of nature. " (Actually, in Wordsworth it is "the speaking face of earth and heaven" [and not the "speaking face of nature"] and it is not, at that moment, addressed! )5 So: not a sheltering sky or earth, not in an economy or tropology of exchange in relation to the mind, and not anthropomorphized or to be addressed. Such would be the materi- ality of what the Augenschein shows in Kant's, for lack of a better word, material vision.
I recapitulate de Man's examples here in order to give some sense of how far he goes in his insistence that what the poets do in Kant is not (like) what the exemplary poet Wordsworth does. What are we to make of this apparently stark divergence between a material vision "as the poets do it," according to Kant, and a figuralized aesthetic vision and a sublime that are everything the material vision is not, as one poet, Wordsworth, does it, according to de Man? And we do not have to know all that much about the special status of "Wordsworth" in de Man's private "canon" to know better than to think that Wordsworth is somehow being given as an example of an insufficient or "inauthen- tic" poet! The fact that Wordsworth comes back still later in the essay to serve quite different purposes--this time as an example of other texts in which there is a "blank" like the "blank" de Man reads be- tween sections 27 and 28, that is, between the accounts of the mathe- matical and the dynamic sublime, in Kant's third Critique--should be
"As the Poets Do It" 5
6 Andrzej Warminski
enough for those who can read. But how Wordsworth comes back here is certainly telling. This time it is not so much what Wordsworth wrote, what is there on the page, as what he did not write but was neverthe- less able to articulate: that is, "the blank between stanzas 1 and 2 of the Lucy poem 'A slumber did my spirit seal . . . ' or between parts 1 and 2 of the Boy of Winander poem. "6 As it happens, what he articu- lates here is an example of a moment when "articulation is threatened by its undoing," when there is "a shift from a tropological to a differ- ent mode of language," as in the case of the "blank" between mathe- matical and dynamic sublimes, where "one could speak of a shift from trope to performance" (AI 89). Given that Wordsworth, of all poets, is able to do this, to do what Kant, or at least Kant's (formal materialist) text, does, it would be worse than premature to relegate him to merely aestheticist status as though he were only another aesthetic ideologist, only another Schiller. 7 It would be more helpful perhaps to recall that de Man's insistence that what the poets do in Kant is not what the poet Wordsworth does is very much like his equally stark declaration in "Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric" that whatever Baudelaire's "Correspondances" may be, "it is, emphatically, not a lyric" but rather something of "an infra-text, a hypogram" underneath lyrics like "Obsession" (or "odes," "idylls," or "elegies") or, for that matter, pseudohistorical period terms such as romanticism or classicism, which are "always terms of resistance and nostalgia, at the furthest re- move from the materiality of actual history" (RR 262). If Wordsworth can be both unlike "the poets" of Kant--in seeing the sky as a shelter- ing sky and nature in terms of phenomenal figures that enter into a tropological system of exchange with the mind or the Imagination and that can be anthropomorphized and addressed--and yet also like them, in being able to articulate, if not to say, the moment of disrup- tion, "the material disarticulation not only of nature but of the body" and thus "the undoing of the aesthetic as a valid category," then "Wordsworth" is very much also "like" the Baudelaire, or one could better say, the Baudelaires of de Man's "Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric. " As the "author"--or rather the signatory--of both the "lyric" "Obsession" and the emphatic nonlyric "Correspondances" that is legible like an infratext or a hypogram "underneath" it, Baudelaire clearly both does and does not do what the poets are sup- posed to do in de Man's account of Kant's material vision. And he does and does not do it because he writes two texts: the lyric "Obsession" and the emphatic nonlyric "Correspondances. " By writing the latter,
Baudelaire writes a text of "true mourning," as de Man puts it at the end of "Anthropomorphism and Trope," that allows for noncompre- hension and enumerates "non-anthropomorphic, non-elegiac, non- celebratory, non-lyrical, non-poetic, that is to say, prosaic, or, better, historical modes of language power" (RR 262). In doing so, "Corre- spondances" constructs something like that architectonic world of Kant's material vision--in this case, not so much a building that is not for dwelling and does not shelter as a temple in which no sacrifice that could transport us from the world of the senses to the world of the spirit takes place. Yet by writing the second text, "Obsession," Baudelaire also writes a lyric of recollection and elegiac mourning that adds remembrance to the flat surface of time in "Correspon- dances" and that engages the full panoply of lyric tropes and devices-- anthropomorphism, apostrophe, exclamation, a je-tu structure, specu- lar symmetry along an axis of assertion and negation, and so on--to result in "the reconciliation of knowledge with phenomenal, aesthetic experience" (RR 258), which, historicized, issues in "the aesthetic ide- ologization of linguistic structures" (RR 253). In writing both texts, Baudelaire is indeed like Wordsworth the phenomenalizing "roman- tic" poet and like Wordsworth the formal materialist who would be as nonlyrical and nonpoetic as those most prosaic poets of Kant. (So: the more "poetic" Wordsworth and Baudelaire, the less they are like "the poets" of Kant; the more "prosaic," the more material and historical. )
But, of course, we should not take the doubleness of the two here-- two texts, two Baudelaires, two Wordsworths--too literally, as though these Wordsworths and Baudelaires were Schillerian aesthetic ideolo- gists in some "poetic" poems and Kantian formal materialists in some other, rather "prosaic," poems. No, insists de Man, "whenever we en- counter a text such as 'Obsession'--that is, whenever we read--there always is an infra-text, a hypogram like 'Correspondances' under- neath" (RR 262). In other words, again, "There always are at least two texts, regardless of whether they are actually written out or not; the relationship between the two sonnets, obligingly provided by Baudelaire for the benefit, no doubt, of future teachers invited to speak on the nature of the lyric, is an inherent characteristic of any text" (RR 260-61). This is certainly borne out by de Man's reading of "Correspondances"--a text that turns out to be as thoroughly double and duplicitous as the double register of the articulating (and disarticu- lating) word comme in its function as both a term of comparison and metaphorical transport based on substances and their properties and a
"As the Poets Do It" 7
8 Andrzej Warminski
more metonymical syntactical marker of aimless enumeration--as a "metaphor aspiring to transcendental totality" gets stuck in "an enu- meration that never goes anywhere" (RR 250). In other words, the infratext or hypogram of "Correspondances" has already (and always again) produced the lyric "Obsession"--whether or not "Obsession" were ever actually written out. And, one should quickly add, whether "Correspondances" were ever actually written out or not! Clearly enough, the "materiality" of the infratext, or the hypogram, or of what de Man calls the "prosaic materiality of the letter" or "material inscription" (or, for that matter, "the materiality of actual history"), is not accessible in phenomenal experience and what appears in empiri- cal space and time. Materiality--or the infratext or hypogram or the letter or the inscription or actual history or the prosaic language power of the poets--is not something we are going to put our finger on. It is also not something that we can give more than inadequate, provision- al, names to. Just as the "material" of "material vision" is "the only word that comes to mind," so "In the paraphernalia of literary termi- nology, there is no term available to tell us what 'Correspondances' might be" (RR 261), and the terms infratext and hypogram are clearly also makeshift stand-ins. All the same, this does not mean that de Man's "materiality"--however difficult and even enigmatic it may be--is as mysterious as all that. The various formulations of what it is not and what it is like, both in the Kant essays and in "Anthropo- morphism and Trope in the Lyric" (and in other essays of the 1980s), indicate where to look for it, or at least how to read it. And that it has indeed everything to do with reading should already be plenty clear. For what else is one going to do to understand the "disruption" or the "blank"--whether between stanzas or parts of Wordsworth poems or between the mathematical and dynamic sublimes or in the juxtaposi- tion of seeing according to what the Augenschein shows with an alle- gorical narrative of how the imagination sacrifices itself for reason-- except to try to read them? And how read these moments in Kant (or Wordsworth or Baudelaire or whatever) where "articulation is threat- ened by its undoing" except by making them intelligible "in linguistic terms," as de Man puts it, if at these moments we encounter passages "that could be identified as a shift from a tropological to a different mode of language"? The poets can help us here again--in this case, de Man's compact account of how we are (and, as always, are not) to understand the relation between the always two texts that there always are whenever we encounter a text, that is, whenever we read. Going
over this account should make it easier for us finally to go back to Kant's sublime and to read the poets and their purportedly material vision in the context of de Man's reading of the mathematical, the dynamic, and the--for lack of a better word--"material" sublimes.
As it happens, the relation between the two texts that there always are whenever there is text--between an intelligible lyric like "Obsession" and its infratext or hypogram like the forever unintelligible "Corre- spondances"--is far from simple. And the question of the order of their relation--its reversibility or irreversibility--is especially difficult, which is perhaps not surprising since it is the same question as that of the relation between critical and ideological discourse: in shorthand, like the paradigmatic relation between Kant and Schiller or, in this case, between "Correspondances" and "Obsession" in relation to one another and in relation to themselves (as, say, "Correspondances"/ "Obsession" and "Obsession"/"Correspondances"). How does it work? On the one hand, the relation is clear: whenever we encounter a text like "Obsession," there is always an infratext, a hypogram, like "Correspondances" underneath. The lyric "Obsession" and its entire tropological system of devices--that is nothing so much as the "defen- sive motion of understanding, the possibility of a future hermeneutics" (RR 261)--is a reading, what de Man calls here "a lyrical reading- motion" and "a lyrical reading" of "Correspondances. " "Obsession" would be the Schiller to "Correspondances"'s Kant. De Man spells out the one hand:
We all perfectly and quickly understand "Obsession," and better still the motion that takes us from the earlier to the later text. But no symmetrical reversal of this lyrical reading-motion is conceivable; if Baudelaire, as is eminently possible, were to have written, in empiri- cal time, "Correspondances" after "Obsession," this would change nothing. "Obsession" derives from "Correspondances" but the reverse is not the case. Neither does it account for it as its origin or cause. "Correspondances" implies and explains "Obsession" but "Obsession" leaves "Correspondances" as thoroughly incomprehensible as it always was. (RR 261)
Nevertheless, however irreversible this defensive motion of under- standing and its lyrical reading-motion, it would be an error and, in- deed, a similar phenomenalizing ideologization to understand this order and its irreversibility in phenomenal (spatial or temporal) terms:
"As the Poets Do It" 9
10 Andrzej Warminski
Whenever we encounter a text such as "Obsession"--that is, whenever we read? there always is an infra-text, a hypogram like "Correspon- dances" underneath. Stating this relationship, as we just did, in phe- nomenal, spatial terms or in phenomenal, temporal terms--"Obsession," a text of recollection and elegiac mourning, adds remembrance to the flat surface of time in "Correspondances"--produces at once a herme- neutic, fallacious lyrical reading of the unintelligible. The power that takes one from one text to the other is not just a power of displacement, be it understood as recollection or interiorization or any other "trans- port," but the sheer blind violence that Nietzsche, concerned with the same enigma, domesticated by calling it, metaphorically, an army of tropes. (RR 262)
As far as the materiality of the actual history, that is, whatever it is that happens "between" "Correspondances" and "Obsession," is con- cerned, the spatial or temporal phenomenality of which text is "under- neath" which and which text comes after which does not matter and changes nothing, that is, does not happen--and understandably enough at that, for, as I said, it also does not matter whether the two texts were ever actually written out or not! Indeed, even if the "lyrical" reading-motion can go only from "Correspondances" to "Obsession," it is also the case that a reading-motion like de Man's of "Corre- spondances" goes from the all-too-poetic lyric of historicizing literary history that declares, performs (in its synaesthesia), and values sheer aesthetic ideology to an infratext underneath that threatens to dis- articulate the poem's transcendentalizing tropes and end up in "the stutter, the pie? tinement of aimless enumeration" (RR 254). In other words, de Man's own (material? what shall we call it? ) "reading- motion" goes from trope to another mode of language and thus, in a sense, from the lyric "Obsession" to the hypogram "Correspondances. " This does not mean, of course, that "Correspondances" and "Obses- sion" are in fact, materially, historically reversible. What is reversible is only the order of which precedes which and which follows which in the temporality of reading (whether lyric or otherwise), that is, in the temporality of an act of understanding and its inevitable temporaliza- tion in an allegory that narrates this act (which involves an inevitable phenomenalization--as de Man remarks in his own language when he says that the infratext or hypogram is "underneath" the lyric or that the lyric adds remembrance to the flat surface of time in "Correspon- dances"). What is not reversible, however, is the power "that takes one
from one text to the other" in these reading-motions, whether they go from the saturation and emptying out of tropes as the text moves from a tropological to another mode of language--from trope to perfor- mance, say--or from the material inscription of the hypogram in a defensive lyrical reading-motion to phenomenalizing aesthetic ideolo- gizations of a celebratory or elegiac, apostrophizing and anthropomor- phizing, poetic lyric. Both are inevitable, irreversible, what happens. What happens is the power that, as de Man puts it, "takes one from one text to the other"--whether there are empirically one or two or more or fewer texts, or whether they "exist," that is, were ever actual- ly written out, or not! --the sheer blind violence of the inaugural act that put the tropological system into place in the first place and that gets repeated whenever we necessarily and inevitably go from one text to the other--that is, whenever we read.
De Man's account of the always two texts of Baudelaire and of reading takes us back to his reading of Kant and helps us to under- stand, in particular, the itinerary, the order, of that reading--that is, the reading of the mathematical and dynamic sublimes and their issuing in the "material sublime" of the poets. Needless to say, understanding this reading, its order, and how the "materiality" of "material vision" emerges from it depends a great deal on making it intelligible "in lin- guistic terms. " "Linguistic" because it turns out that all three moments of Kant's sublime--mathematical, dynamic, and, for lack of a word, material--are to be understood not as philosophical (transcendental or even metaphysical) principles but as what de Man calls a "linguistic principle. " In order: the mathematical sublime becomes intelligible-- all too intelligible (like Baudelaire's "Obsession")--and can "work," but to a formal extent only, as a linguistic principle. The "linguistic model" of this principle is that of discourse as a tropological system-- a very familiar metaphorico-metonymical system of subsitution and exchange on the axes of selection and combination, paradigmatic and syntagmatic. In brief, this system would articulate "the infinity of num- ber" with "the totality of extension"--which is the burden of "proving" the mathematical sublime--in terms of two acts of the imagination: apprehension and comprehension, Auffassung and Zusammenfassung. "Apprehension proceeds successively, as a syntagmatic, consecutive motion along an axis, and it can proceed ad infinitum without difficulty. Comprehension, however, which is a paradigmatic totalization of the apprehended trajectory, grows increasingly difficult as the space cov- ered by apprehension grows larger" (AI 77). This amounts to a system
"As the Poets Do It" 11
12 Andrzej Warminski
of exchange and substitution: "As the paradigmatic simultaneity sub- stitutes for the syntagmatic succession, an economy of loss and gain is put in place which functions with predictable efficacy" but, adds de Man, "only within certain well-defined limits" (AI 77). The limits are clear. Although the power of number can indeed progress to infinity on the level of apprehension--that is, logically, in terms of numerical concepts--the imagination which is to totalize this infinity in one com- prehension soon reaches a point at which it is saturated and can no longer make additional apprehensions: "it cannot progress beyond a certain magnitude which marks the limit of the imagination. " It is at this privileged point which "avoids both excessive comprehension and excessive apprehension" that the imagination makes its stand, as it were, and takes as a trope an impossible trope that is in fact not a metaphor but a catachresis, of a totalized, bordered-off infinity, as though it could comprehend it in one intuition. (Kant's example of Savary's account of one's experience of pyramids is well known. ) What this means is that the mathematical sublime, as such a tropological sys- tem of substitution, is in fact not a judgment of the "absolutely large" but rather a somewhat subrepetitious displacement, transposition (Kant's German in fact says versetzen here), and substitution of the "almost too large" that is not yet "the too large"--in Kant's terms, of the "colossal" that is not yet the "monstrous"--for the "absolutely large. "8 It would be an impossible phenomenal trope of infinity, of that which is, by definition, not susceptible to being exhibited (dargestellt) in one sensory intuition. (In terms of de Man's reading of the zero in Pascal, this would be once again the substitution of one as a trope of the zero, in that case a substitution of number as trope for that which marks the limit of number, that is the beyond-number, the zero as pure sign. )9 It is right for de Man to say that this certain magnitude "marks" the limit of the imagination, for what is going on here is in- deed the phenomenalization of a mere marker of infinity (like, say, a zero) in a perceptible, imaginable, conceivable trope (like, say, a one). If the articulation of number and extension seems to take place, it does so as a tropological system of substitutions that are impossible except in terms of such a purely formal system. De Man summarizes:
The desired articulation of the sublime takes place, with suitable reser- vations and restrictions, within such a purely formal system. It follows, however, that it is conceivable only within the limits of such a system, that is, as pure discourse rather than as a faculty of the mind. When the
sublime is translated back, so to speak, from language into cognition, from formal description into philosophical argument, it loses all inher- ent coherence and dissolves in the aporias of intellectual and sensory appearance. It is also established that, even within the confines of language, the sublime can occur only as a single and particular point of view, a privileged place that avoids both excessive comprehension and excessive apprehension, and that this place is only formally, and not transcendentally, determined. The sublime cannot be grounded as a philosophical (transcendental or metaphysical) principle, but only as a linguistic principle. Consequently, the section on the mathematical sub- lime cannot be closed off in a satisfactory manner and another chapter on the dynamics of the sublime is needed. (AI 78)
So: if the mathematical sublime is "possible" only within the confines of such a purely formal tropological system, it is no wonder that the epistemological and the eudaemonic proofs of the mathematical sublime--that de Man treats before his discussion of Auffassung and Zusammenfassung and Kant treats after--end up in the assertions of the possibility of the sublime by dint of its impossibility and failure: "The sublime cannot be defined as the failure of the sublime, for this failure deprives it of its identifying principle" (AI 75). The "section on the mathematical sublime cannot be closed off in a satisfactory man- ner" because its (linguistic) principle of discourse as a tropological sys- tem cannot itself be closed off. For what happens is this: in its purely positional transposition of number into extension, of inscribed mark- ers into phenomenal tropes, of catachreses into impossible metaphors, the tropological system of the mathematical sublime introduces into itself an excess or a lack that cannot be mastered or controlled or accounted for by the resources--by the principles of substitution and combination--of that system and therefore prevents itself from ever being able to close itself off as a system. (This is an excess--of mark- ing, of substitutions other than trope, purely differential relations and entities; and a lack--of the one metaphor that could complete the tropological system and allow it to close itself off. )10 De Man's way of putting it is that "the transition from the mathematical to the dynamic sublime, a transition for which the justification is conspicuously lack- ing in the text, . . . marks [again, marks] the saturation of the tropo- logical field as language frees itself of its constraints and discovers within itself a power no longer dependent on the restrictions of cogni- tion" (AI 79). In other words, it is precisely the impossible tropes of
"As the Poets Do It" 13
14 Andrzej Warminski
the infinite--of that which is overdeterminately exterior to the tropo- logical system of Auffassung and Zusammenfassung--that prohibit the tropological system of the mathematical sublime to close itself off, that is, prevent it from being able to account for its own principles of substitution and exchange in terms of principles internal to its (tropo- logical) system; meaning that the one thing this tropological system cannot account for is its own production, the "principle" according to which it was put into place in the first place. Hence this system opens up radically, and empties out in the force, violence, and power of the dynamic sublime--which force, violence, and power in the end (as at the beginning) are only the repetition of the inaugural act that put the tropological system into place "in the first place. " According to de Man, this is "the only way to account for . . .