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Theoretical Inquiry
Language, Linguistics, and Literature
By Austin E. Quigley Yale University Press
Copyright © 2004 Austin E. Quigley
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-300-10166-9
Chapter One
Literary Theory and Linguistic Theory
Legend has it that, when the British Broadcasting Corporation resumed its television service after the Second World War, the first announcer to appear on screen (who had also been the last to appear some years before) began with the words: "As I was saying, before I was so rudely interrupted...." With the decline in literary studies of deconstructive relativism and its replacement by the further contextual monisms of politicized cultural studies, a more constrained pluralism has resumed the task of trying to move the discipline forward, giving the current situation in literary studies a similar sense of restarting after interruption. Books by Booth, Scholes, Graff, Ellis, Armstrong, Damrosch, Woodring, and others have renewed attempts to reconcile creativity with control by characterizing critical pluralism as strongly constrained community inquiry and positioning it as an alternative to weakly constrained individual ingenuity on the one hand and cultural/historical/theoretical determinism on the other.
To such pluralists the ability of skeptically inclined deconstructers to command attention on the basis of beingrelativistically interesting rather than monistically right could only be a fleeting interruption based upon misleading alternatives, for being interesting involves not just displaying figurative ingenuity but also achieving some form of persuasiveness. The latter does not necessarily involve being right, but it does mean coming publicly to terms with constraints that emerge from texts, contexts, and audiences. A reluctance to acknowledge those constraints is by no means equivalent to a freedom to ignore them, and it is helpful to no one to have complex issues involving linguistic order and disorder reduced to a simplistic choice between ideological necessity and quasi-romantic arbitrariness. The claims of generality and particularity require a more sophisticated form of reconciliation.
Although it was temporarily exhilarating for many of those committed to deconstruction to emphasize latent textual disorder as a means of promoting a process of interpretation that makes maximum room for critical creativity, even the most extreme argument in favor of multiple readings relies, as Booth points out, "on some sense of understanding that provides limits to multiplicity." In avant-garde rhetoric, of course, such limits tend to be downplayed, and this can generate some confusion. In the case of deconstruction, advocates tended to emphasize the constraints that they wished to escape at the expense of those they were prepared to observe, so they purchased their iconoclasm at eventual cost to their credibility. By and large, they were more adept at theoretically distinguishing their position from that of despised monists than from that of radical skeptics. In the latter respect, however, their theorizing was not always matched by their practice, which was not entirely an exemplification of the kind of freedom their rhetoric suggested, a kind of freedom that Kant, as Booth reminds us, wryly critiqued many years ago: "The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might [well] imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space."
In practice, deconstructive ingenuity, like any other form of interpretive ingenuity, sought to balance its claims to freedom with the observance of certain regulative controls, but as the bulk of poststructuralist theorizing was directed against the various kinds of monistic foundationalism it attempted to transcend, it tended to underemphasize the procedures by which it sought to avoid being merely a radical relativism. Had it taken up the neglected task and sought to situate itself between monism and relativism, it would, of course, have been forced to portray itself in less radical terms, indeed, as an alternative attempt to occupy the terrain already claimed by pluralism.
Taking this course would, however, have put deconstruction at something of a disadvantage, for when compared to the pluralisms that preceded it and aspire to succeed it, deconstruction seems a somewhat impoverished form of pluralism. Having paid more attention to what it was against than what it was for, deconstruction tended to focus insufficiently on the significance of the constraints it acknowledged and consequently neglected to maintain their flexibility. An unfortunate result was that, although some deconstructive readings were as ingenious as the radical rhetoric would suggest, many came to seem, as several commentators quickly pointed out, rather predictable. Underacknowledged forms of control were allowed to atrophy into mechanical procedures and, ironically enough, a movement whose rhetoric made it vulnerable to charges of radical relativism managed to generate a practice vulnerable to charges of inflexible monism. As Graff put it:
The deconstructionists' foreknowledge that all texts are allegories of their own unreadability (or that they necessarily foreground the problematic of representation, mask and reveal their rhetorical conditions of possibility, undo their claims of reference by their figurality, metaphoricity, and so forth) is made suspect by its monotonous universality of application.... To assume that, by some structural necessity of discourse or desire, all literature or all texts undo the logics of significations on which they operate only tends to make the revelation of that process in any particular text a foregone conclusion.
This predictability, this lapse into formulaic appropriation of texts, is, ironically enough, precisely what deconstruction, and the pluralisms that preceded and succeeded it, set out to avoid. The emergence of formulaic readings from the putatively iconoclastic camp of deconstruction not only displays its limitations as a form of pluralism, but also exemplifies the recurring tendency in literary theory of rejected forms of monism to reassert themselves, even in the most unlikely places. Indeed the emergence of a dogmatic practice from deconstruction's skeptical theory provides the most spectacular example since the advent of vulgar Marxism and vulgar Freudianism of the problematic relationship between theories and theorists. No matter how radical or idealistic the form of discourse, it threatens, if it is adopted as a privileged form of discourse, to lapse into a univocal interpretive method that encounters in texts only what it presupposes to be there. A predictable discovery of indeterminacy, whatever the importance of elements of indeterminacy, thus becomes as limited and limiting as any other forms of predictable discovery, including those of contemporary cultural materialism. It is just this tendency of modes of critical discourse to invite excessive commitment and thus promote programmatic procedures that prompted Booth to emphasize that the first principle of the pluralism that he derives from Crane, Burke, and Abrams is "that critical truth can never be exhausted in any one mode" of critical practice. The recurring appeal of the pluralist perspective is that it recognizes and seeks to address the dangers to critical practice of unreflective monism while seeking also to avoid the alternative danger of uncontrolled relativism, but the recurring challenge is to characterize the nature of a compelling and controllable alternative.
For pluralism to make its case persuasive, it needs not only to acknowledge the coexistence of these two apparently opposed dangers, but also to clarify its intermittent recognition of their puzzling relatedness. And this turns out to be a task fraught with difficulty, for the pluralist, too, is vulnerable to their competing claims. If pluralism is to avoid being a disguised monism, it must, as Booth has argued, insist on the "irreducible variety of critical languages." If it is to avoid being a species of radical relativism, however, it must claim that the various critical languages are not only irreconcilable but also capable of some kind of fruitful interaction with each other. The tendency of deconstruction to move back and forth between destabilizing theory and repetitive practice thus recapitulates the tendency of other forms of pluralism, and of literary studies in general, to be overcome by the insidious attractions of either relativism or monism. The example of deconstruction is salutary in this regard, however, for the movement's tendency to display not just one, but both of the vulnerabilities of pluralism underlines the peculiar relatedness of what we might have supposed to be alternative dangers. And this suggests in turn that we look more carefully at the implications of the complementary and not just contrasting relationship in literary studies between monistic necessity and relativistic arbitrariness. Renewed arguments in favor of a more constrained pluralism cannot be persuasive unless they can demonstrate means of avoiding the problems that initially generated and subsequently diminished enthusiasm for both aspects of the deconstructive movement.
It is not my purpose to add here to the series of critiques of poststructuralism, nor, in the light of their devastating culmination in Ellis's Against Deconstruction, does it seem necessary to do so. What is of current importance is whether key limitations in deconstruction's procedures can be used to clarify general problems of pluralistic engagement in a manner that enables us to learn from previous difficulties. If we do not recognize and seek to understand the tendency of literary studies to oscillate between extremes, the demise of deconstructive relativism followed immediately by the emergence of new monisms in cultural studies will simply be the prelude to the emergence of yet another claim for unfettered critical freedom followed by yet another for privileged contextual control.
As has been widely remarked, so radical were the claims of deconstruction about the instability of language and the inevitability of misreading that they invited immediate questions about the consistency between the claims of the argument and the procedures by which it was advanced. Lengthy statements seeking to articulate and defend a position about linguistic instability seem curiously self-defeating. As this inconsistency was accompanied by unconvincing historical claims and apparent ignorance of earlier scholarship on key issues under discussion, deconstruction had serious problems to address. But these familiar problems are by no means the only points at issue. Just as important is the fact that dogmatic practice eventually emerged from skeptical theory in part because claims to a new logic encouraged proponents to dismiss rather than address counterarguments. Advocates of a putatively skeptical form of analysis were inclined, as advocates of other approaches are inclined, to require from potential practitioners a single leap of faith rather than an attitude of sustained inquiry, and this familiar procedure had in this case both predictable and less predictable results.
The success of deconstruction in attracting such support without addressing counterarguments had two important effects. One was to allow the individual voices of deconstruction to merge into a collective voice of choric conviction as claims to a new logic insulated the theory from (of all things) skeptical counter-voices. The other was to turn unpersuaded commentators increasingly toward other kinds of response to the surprisingly large volume of work that the movement roduced. The tendency was to widen the frame of reference by investing in sociological and institutional analyses in order to explain how a movement so widely viewed as suspect could have achieved, without apparently earning it, such a degree of prominence in the academic world. Though the intellectual and scholarly arguments against deconstruction seemed powerful enough, their initially limited effectiveness suggested to Graff that the rise and fall of deconstruction tells us more about the limiting institutional politics of literary studies than about its enabling procedures. The effect of sociological and institutional forms of analysis, however, has been to present further problems for the viability of deconstruction without establishing that even this frame of reference is, in fact, wide enough to explain just what went wrong. As we have noted, the issues that emerge in institutional and sociological analysis recapitulate issues with a much longer history, a history that suggests the linguistic nature of the further frame of reference that may yet be needed. The sociological and institutional analyses have, however, established a useful point of departure.
For Ellis the argument against deconstruction is primarily scholarly and logical, but it is in sociological terms that he registers his own puzzlement about the rise of deconstruction in the United States and its implications. Recognizing the destabilizing appeal of deconstruction in an authoritarian intellectual environment like that of France, Ellis wonders how it managed to flourish as a radically new position in the already diversified intellectual environment of the United States. Reconsidering in this light the movement's success in America, he argues that its prominence was not so much a consequence of its capacity to oppose some monolithic status quo as of its ability to give the already existing climate of multiple opinion "a new air of legitimacy." Deconstructive relativism thus served initially not so much to undermine existing consensus as to confirm its absence by exploiting a widespread fascination with novelty that somehow coexists with an equally widespread suspicion of (other people's) dogmatism.
Graff explores the coexistence of dogmatism and skepticism further by arguing that, far from being a site of established authority, the morsellated literary domain in American universities has for a long time verged on chaos. Its very openness to new kinds of thought not only grants all kinds of putative novelty a hearing but also makes it comparatively easy for them to acquire an institutional place. The institutional problem that deconstruction illustrates rather than resolves is thus the tendency of academic institutions to make places for competing modes of inquiry without encouraging, indeed, by discouraging, their interaction. As Graff disturbingly suggests, the recurring consequence of demands from various intellectual and ideological groups that they be granted their own autonomous programs, research centers, or departments is not just that they acquire institutional status but also that they can be accommodated without being attended to. And it is this institutional pattern that encourages skepticism and dogmatism to coexist rather than interact.
The indifference of proponents of deconstruction to charges of historical inaccuracy, scholarly ignorance, theoretical incoherence, and logical inconsistency is thus simply an extreme example of attitudes adopted by proponents of many modes of inquiry whose efforts to establish themselves within the academy are quickly followed by efforts to insulate themselves once the goal is achieved. In dismissing rather than addressing counterarguments, in claiming to have a logic of its own that is not answerable to the logics that preceded it or coexist with it, deconstruction seems, in this respect, as characteristic a phenomenon of the American academic world as it is, in its opposition to all kinds of authority, a phenomenon of the French avant-garde.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Theoretical Inquiry by Austin E. Quigley Copyright © 2004 by Austin E. Quigley. Excerpted by permission.
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