L I T E R A RY T H E O RY: A N H I S T O R I C A L I N T R O D U C T I O N
humanities. This field cannot be thought as a whole: it resists totalization. Not because of its infinitude: but as a result of the absence of a centre which would control and arrest the play of substitutions.2 This “movement of play … is the movement of supplementarity. One cannot determine the centre and exhaust totalization because the sign which replaces the centre, which supplements it, taking the centre’s place in its absence – this sign… occurs as a surplus, as a supplement.” (Ibid., p. 289)3 Due to these conflicting aspects of Derrida’s influence – stressing, on the one hand, the responsibility for humanities, and, on the other hand, the pervasiveness of “the play of substitutions” establishing their discourse – the position of deconstruction at American universities has been rather problematic. On the one hand, Derrida himself complains that the American academics tried to “domesticate” deconstruction as a general “method for reading and for interpretation” (“Letter to a Japanese Friend”, in A Derrida Reader, p. 273), on the other hand, there have been attempts to get rid of deconstruction as an irresponsible game clashing with requirements of political correctness. The greatest threat to deconstruction was the discovery (in 1987) of the collaborationist journalism of Paul de Man published during the Nazi occupation of his native Belgium. De Man’s moral failure was overstated as the failure of deconstruction. One journalist called deconstruction “a vast amnesty project for the politics of collaboration during World War II” (Newsweek, Feb. 15, 1988, p. 65). The fact that deconstruction was adopted by many American critics does not imply that their theoretical positions were close to that of Derrida. In his book From the New Criticism to Deconstruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) Art Berman has shown that “the Americans have been using structuralism and post-structuralism for purposes of their own; they have not been simply following European practices.” (p. 60) The basic distinction in European (mainly French) and American critical writing “is the concept of 2
The term “play of substitutions” means the appearance of changes and modifications of any system which occur at random, without having been prescribed in its structure, and do not allow a rigid classification according to some central principle or value. Take different versions of the Promethean myth. In some of them Prometheus is a trickster and a thief, in others he is a creator of mankind. This is difficult to explain by means of the structural opposition trickster vs. god because Prometheus never has a divine role, not even in Shelley’s famous dramatic poem. 3 This passage of Derrida’s lecture describes the function of words like mana or taboo which are supplied for something non-existent, like the direct contact with the sacred or the name of the totem deity, but have a number of supplementary meanings in numerous cultural contexts and activities.
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PA RT O N E : H I S T O R I C A L O U T L I N E O F L I T E R A RY T H E O R I E S
‘self,’ its properties and practices, especially as these involve disputes concerning freedom of will and determinism” (pp. 60–61). Historically, this distinction is due to the enormous impact of new criticism, a critical project immediately preceding deconstruction. New criticism liberated literary studies from the influence of positivist philology and history. It also established the pattern of interaction of literary criticism with other disciplines (their different purposes are respected but their methods are compared, adapted, employed by literary critics). This interaction was occurring in different areas where also the most important features of the American concept of the self can be located: in social uses of science and technology, existentialist notions of freedom and the conceptions of human thought and action in behaviourist psychology. One of the most important results of new criticism is the continuation and deepening of the rupture between culture on the one hand, and science and technology, on the other hand. Some opinions (voiced for instance by Leo Marx in his Machine in the Garden, 1964) maintained that the technological civilization was the major factor that had severed America from European culture and isolated it from the rest of the world. According to Leo Marx, the original component of the American dream (the image of America as the Garden of Eden) was problematized mainly under the influence of technology. And Victor Ferkiss (in The Future of Technological Civilization, 1974) showed that the influence of technology on American civilization had been so massive that freedom had ceased to be understood in the European way, namely as a possibility of choice, and was determined mainly with regard to the self, or the identity of the person making this choice. The self is the I defined in existential or psychological terms, often with respect to the use of technology (the French philosopher and psychiatrist Michel Foucault developed the theory of the “technologies of the self”, i.e., of different practices maintaining the integrity of the I). The fact that the integrity of the self may be given by the use of technology also accounts for the deployment of deconstruction as a method, legitimizing the individual critical readings. The relation between the self and technology is modified by the influence of existentialism which emphasizes a distrust of language as the major instrument of philosophical analysis. This tendency is amply demonstrated in the work of a German philosopher Martin Heidegger. In America, Frank Lentricchia pointed out the parallels between the existentialist intention to analyze the exceptional, authentic experience of an individual and the new critical effort to interpret the
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L I T E R A RY T H E O RY: A N H I S T O R I C A L I N T R O D U C T I O N
tension and ambiguity in the language of a poem: “What we call existentialism in philosophy is merely a thinner, generalized version of the unresolvable experimental tensions that are ‘dramatically entangled’ in the linguistic complexities of the organic poem” [i.e. the poem having the complex organic form] (Criticism and Social Change [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983], p. 234). We have learned that one of the important categories of American new criticism (in The Well Wrought Urn by Cleanth Brooks) is paradox based on irony which transforms the existentialist emphasis on the individual experience into the new critical regard of the “general human experience” without damaging the privileged position of the poet able to express the infinite complexity of this experience. Thus, in the new critical understanding, literature is made superior to all human activities and even to philosophy. Apart from being able to name the existential dilemmas as does philosophy, it can harmonize them due to its esthetic function. Consequently, deconstruction in America is aimed more against this ambition of new criticism to elevate literature above all discourses than against the logocentrism of philosophy or culture. Moreover, it is not so much concerned with the subject and subjectivity in literature (also because of the introspective, psychological interpretation of the self and its freedom, established by thinkers like Erich Fromm) but is directed mainly against the objective interpretations of the literary work of art we know from Cleanth Brooks, J.C. Ransom or Wellek and Warren. Another development that influenced new criticism and deconstruction was the debate about the subject and methodology of psychology. It was already shown how the early new critics in England (I.A. Richards) attempted to combine the empirical description of mental processes (in the manner of Lockean and Hartleyan associationist psychology) and the romantic notions of creativity and “organic imagination”. In America, this synthesis was thought impossible, which caused a division between two concepts of psychology: as the science of “mind” and as the science of “behaviour”. Under the dominant influence of behaviourist psychology, the approach to language began to change. Language was no longer understood as “the expression or the communication of an individual or collective mind” but started to be investigated as a specific behaviour. This accounts, among others, for John Searle’s theory of speech acts (performative theory of language). This theory was deconstructed in Derrida’s essay “Limited Inc. a b c” (1977) showing that language is inconceivable as a system of speech acts but that its performative character establishes intercultural and intertextual links which cannot be
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