On 12/21/06, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> Let's look at a few paragraphs of actual deconstructive criticism, from
> Tilottama Rajan, "The Supllement of Reading," New Literary History 17 n.
> 3 (Spring 1986).
>
> ____
> This crucial step is taken in Shelley's Defence of Poetry.
> Anglo-American criticism has tended to place the Defence within a
> classical and English philosophical and critical tradition. But it is
> better understood as an analogue to developments in Continental
> hermeneutics, which attempts a defence of logocentrism in the wake of
> its own deconstruction of structuralist concepts of Linguistic and
> literary systems. Early in his argument Shelley proclaims confidently a
> view of language as a free-standing system similar to that conceived by
> Saussure, in which words bear a direct relationship to thoughts, or in
> which the acoustic image evokes the concept signified by it. Acoustic
> images or "sounds" (to use Shelley's word) "have relations both between
> each other and towards that which they represent,"9 and it is the
> former, the syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations among signifiers,
> that guarantee the coherence of the signified and its uptake by the
> reader. But simultaneously Shelley questions this belief that the
> relationship between conception and expression is unproblematical (278).
> In the famous description of the mind as a fading coal, he speaks of the
> fracturing of the sign that occurs in the transition from inspiration to
> composition (294). Given this disjunction between signifier and
> signified endemic to writing, a self-present meaning can no longer be
> located in the written text, but must be sought in what for
> convenience's sake we shall call the work: the conception or thought
> that exists before it is formulated in a Language which makes it
> different from itself. If I seem to use a poststructuralist vocabulary,
> the choice is deliberate, for Shelley's prose everywhere betrays the
> pressure of seeing the text as decentered and semiotically fractured,
> even as it resists this pressure through a phenomenological hermeneutics
> which enables him to defer the centering of meaning from the text to the
> consciousness of the author, and to shift the structural actualization
> of this meaning from the text to the reader. Shelley's view of the
> communicative process thus goes far beyond Schleiermacher's: it
> short-circuits grammatical reading of the text by seeking an immediate
> psychological fusion with the author on a subliminal or transverbal
> level. Correspondingly it also eliminates the need for structural
> actualization in the text: "a word, or a trait in the representation of
> a scene or a passion, will touch the enchanted chord and reanimate in
> those who have ever experienced these emotions, the sleeping, the cold,
> the buried image of the past" (294). And again: "A single sentence may
> be considered as a whole, though it may be found in the midst of a
> series of unassimilated portions" (281). Moreover, Shelley can go far
> beyond the concept of reading as a completion and actualization of the
> text to a concept of reading as reversal which we will discuss later.
> His own readings of Dante and Milton are hermeneutic but not exegetical.
> Instead of explicating what is in the text, he locates the meaning of
> the work in the author's intention, which is radically at odds with the
> published text, and thus inaccessible except to a purely psychological
> reading.
> ____
Well, let us look at this paragraph. For me (an unabashed lover of Shelley) it does not say anything at all about Shelley. It doesn't add to my conception of Shelley, or put Shelley in any context, except for the context of the author's own "scholasticism". Yes, Carrol there is no doubt at all from the evidence here that Rajan is imposing her own views on Shelley, whatever she may say in the rest of her essay. And I have to say, it is this kind of writing that makes me extremely sad. All those who read it and believe it cannot gain an appreciation of Shelley because of it. I think quite the opposite, and I mean no insult to Carrol, but believing what this paragraph says leads to a depreciation of Shelley.
In contrast to the above paragraph let me quote another author's description of Shelley's "Defence of Poetry."
This is from one of the best biographies of an author ever written: _Shelley: The Pursuit_ by Richard Holmes.
"Apart from Shelley's defence of Milton's Satan (as a moral being far superior to his God), his finest purely literary description concerned Dante. He saw him equally as a pure poet, as a political influence, and as an eternal force in European culture. Shelley's language here was so charged with his peculiar radiant imagery, and the insistent almost Biblical rhythms which recalls passages of _Prometheus Unbound_, that it really takes a considerable effort to hold on to the argument. Shelley believed a great masterpiece had a quality of self-regeneration: it took on new forms and significance for its readers as it moved beyond its own time, and its own culture. This argument is wonderfully perceptive, and showed once again, the authority of a poet and translator who had proved it true." (p. 644).
It is my contention that everything of what is "true", but merely referred to as a hobby-horse for "theoretical correspondences", in the paragraph written by Rajan is described by Holmes and made understandable. From Holmes we know about the difficulty of the essay, and its "hermeneutics," and its "fracturing," the "relations among signifiers", all that Rajan expresses in terms that shouldn't be accepted as describing anything at all, is expressed in terms by Holmes that helps the reader understand better what Shelley is actually saying.
Shelley surely wanted to figure out how his poetry and the poetry of others worked on the mind. Explanations of how language itself works was certainly important to him, both abstractly and in the "sensual" moment of articulation. For anyone who is familiar with Shelley's "Defence of Poetry" Rajan's analysis is beside the point of the essay, it is in fact a strangulation of the essay in service of his "thesis".
The reference to Saussure is an example. You would have no idea from reading the paragraph that what is original in the essay is not at all anything that Shelley may have copied from Saussure ( reading backwards ) about language. What Shelley writes about language-itself, was actually rather common place, and could be found in many authors who Shelley was arguing _against_ . What was exciting and not common-place in the essay was Shelley's articulation of his notions about the "imaginative faculty." In other words emphasizing some kind of commonality with Saussure is simply part of what Geoffre Harpman called "the critical fetish of language," an obsession with a misinterpretation of Saussure. If a "critic" wants to read into Shelley's essay as an example of a prefiguration of the author's imagination of Saussure he can do so, but don't expect me to accept this as a comment on Shelley. This paragraph should not even pass the basic scholarship test, and I have to wonder about a journal that will allow it through.
For anyone one not familiar with Shelley, nothing is learned about the "Defense of Poetry", in Rajan's paragraph. I would recommend the essay itself to those who have not read it, and to those who were forced to read it in some classroom. It is not an easy essay for reasons I will try to explain. I would recommend a rereading in the context of Shelley's poetry. Read it and read it as a probing work of a poet, trying to understand his relation to language in general, and also to the "historical moment of articulation".
I am sorry for that last phrase in scare-quotes. But it is simply true that a little knowledge of Shelley's awareness of his own place in history is helpful. His awareness of his relation to a "tradition" of poetry that he himself tried to invent, and a tradition of radical political thought that he wished to carry through, was primary to writing this essay. Also an awareness of Shelley's self-awareness that even in relation to his own "invented traditions" he remained an outsider, an exile. All of this helps the reader to understand why Shelley would write this essay in the first place.
Shelley wrote this "Defence" as part of a political project that would justify his own poetic practice. Shelley had a belief that "imagination" was a part of history, was part of what we would today call the "reality" of history, and within _this_ living reality of "the imagination-in-history" was the growth of "liberty.' If anyone would like me to try to explain Shelley's relation to his historical time, how he placed himself within a tradition, that he himself tried to articulate and define, and Shelley's own very interesting views of history and the poet (and other writers who use imagination) in history, I will give you my best as part of a discussion. I have my own thoughts on this but anyone who is simply interested in Shelley's politics I would recommend _Radical Shelley. The Philosophical Anarchism and Utopian Thought of Percy Bysshe Shelley_ by Michael Henry Scrivener.
But let us move to other problems with this paragraph. Without reading the whole article it is hard to tell, but it doesn't seem to me that the author knows what she is talking about in relation to Shelley. Or rather it is more accurate to say that the paragraph exhibits evidence that she simply doesn't care about Shelley at all. My guess is that she is not talking about Shelley but rather about how Shelley fits into deconstructionist "theories" of language and "meaning." _That_ is the point of the article. Again the style of the paragraph seems to me to hide the fact that reading Shelley is beside the point. This is what I find disturbing about this kind of writing. My belief is that any reader here, can go back to Shelley's essay, and then have a discussion with me or someone who really cares for Shelley's poetry and politics, and come away from it all with a bit of contempt for this "use" of Shelley. No matter how much Carrol claims that this is not the author projecting her "theories" on to Shelley, there is simply no other way to interpret this paragraph.
Because Rajan uses Shelley in a completely "backward" manner, a kind of "reverse whiggish history" which somehow shows that one's "theories" were immanent in previous "texts.". It is my contention that even the best of this kind of criticism (probably) always "uses" the text in a way that rewinds history as a "theoretical" mash-up. He "reads" modern post-structuralist theories into Shelley, reading history backwards and out of context. One would never know that Shelley wrote this essay as an outgrowth of his long essay, his radical political statement, "A Philosophical View of Reform", that the point of "Defence of Poetry" was the role of "poetry" (considered as an expression of the imaginative faculty) as a force for freedom.
The "articulations" in this paragraph have very little to do (if it has anything at all to do) with what Shelley writes in the "Defence". There is no indication here that for Shelley, "language" was only a very small part of the "imaginative faculty" in poetry. No indication that what was most important to Shelley was human experience and how this (poetic) experience was part of the moral and political development of human kind. Given the fact that it seems to me that what was primary to Shelley was experience in poetry and how that experience, which included the unity of feeling and thought, I cannot see at all how Rajan can say something like "The Defence of Poetry" is a "a defence of logocentrism". Even if their could be such a "defense of logocentrism" (I doubt it) Shelley's "Defence of Poetry is certainly not one. This is because Shelley makes clear that he takes "poetry" to be affective, a "poetry of life" that has little to do with words, that sometimes can be found in the great imagination of specific poets.
And finally, there is no indication in Rajan's paragraph of both the unfortunate and fruitful aspects of "The Defence". These aspects all derive from the same fact; it was not a "single" work, with a single "line" of understanding, of language or politics or "literary criticism". Shelley's "Defense" was an "_anthology_" of his thought. He lifted passages from many previous essays, "Philosophical View", "An Essay on the Devil" (the wonderful passage on Milton's Satan came from here), his preface to a translation of Plato's "Symposium", his "Essay on Christianity" etc. What Rajan amusingly interprets as Shelley's "hermeneutic" is largely a result of Shelley's own intentions and his own self-quotations. It is a bad interpretation to "read" theory into this method. Rajan is certainly in her rights to mangle and strangle Shelley's work in this way, but she is not in good standing with her readers to do this kind of "reading backwards" without making it explicit, saying that she is not reading Shelley at all, but finding in Shelley precursors to what she wants to argue as a whole.
As I said the dense references to current (so-called) "theory" in the paragraph is a cover for a lack of anything new to say about Shelley. A sentence such as this "If I seem to use a poststructuralist vocabulary, the choice is deliberate, for Shelley's prose everywhere betrays the pressure of seeing the text as decentered and semiotically fractured, even as it resists this pressure through a phenomenological hermeneutics which enables him to defer the centering of meaning from the text to the consciousness of the author, and to shift the structural actualization of this meaning from the text to the reader," simply needs to be laughed at, if read at all. Any author who writes such a sentence simply is not writing about her subject unless her subject is is her own post-structuralist "critique". And why shouldn't the reader's bullshit detector start twinging with such a sentence? Quite frankly I am a little bit disturbed that Carrol ( who I respect ) presents these passages as something that illustrates a point that this stuff might be worth reading. When I first read his excerpt I simply thought he was trying to show my point. I don't know. It is certainly an indication of a kind of ideology. (I believe Shelley himself would have scorned this kind of writing.) The reason I call it an ideology is because you have to accept the methodology in the first place, and the mistaken "world view" behind it, in order to believe that such a "use" of Shelley, actually shows anything about Shelley. It doesn't. And as I offered above, I can go into this more, on or off-list.
I want to end with another illustration. Chris Doss said that he finds Zizek "easy" to read. O.K. I want to quote Zizek as an illustration of the common place of riding the hobby-horse of your preferred "theory" backwards into history. This is Zizek writing about the Italian neo-realist film director Roberto Rossellini.
"Rossellini was perfectly aware of the crucial role of the performative dimension in structuring the intersubjetive space: an entire series of his films is centered on the dialectic of "playing a role," of assuming performatively a symbolic mandate." (_Enjoy Your Symptoms_ p. 33.)
For those of you unaware "performative" refers to "speech act theory", originating (in some sense) with John L. Austin (he called it an "illocutionary act" or a "constative utterance") and continuing with Peter Strawson and John Searle. To put it very simply, (and without all the debates surrounding), if you offer me $10 dollars in exchange for delivery of 10 pounds of apples, and I say, "Yes, I accept the deal", the speech act of saying "Yes" has created a social relation between us that we call a "contract." You have promised to a performance for me (giving me $10) and I have promised to perform something for you (bringing you 10 pounds of apples.) So this is the "kind" of "structuring of the intersubjective space" that Zizek is writing about. But he is also assuming that somehow "playing a role" is also a "speech act" of some kind and that you create a "promise" (mandate) by assuming the role, and the role itself is a "symbol" of the mandate or promise.
Just fine, and as I said, my own mind finds Zizek fun (this says something about me, I know). But is this anything but playing with ideas, as if they are acrostics, and using movies to do so? And what in the world can Zizek mean when he writes that "Rossellini was perfectly aware" of this. No matter what kind of pomo stuff I read I find such statements, over and over again. Maybe he means that Rossellini "shows us" illustrations of "this." But try to imagine Rossellini himself reading this sentence about his "perfect awareness" of this "performative" dimension in his work. I am almost sure he would laugh, because I have heard his daughter (Isabella) describe his laugh at critics over-analyzing his movies.
Perhaps it is simply a "mistake" to write in this way; it is not really "meant." But I don't think so. I think that it is a deeply ingrained ideological commitment to "read history backwards" so that confirmations of your theories are "always already" there in the films that you "read".
Does this do harm to "understanding" and "viewing" Rossellini? It could if you take it too seriously, if you really accept the ideology of this kind of "reading backwards" from "theory." But in most cases (especially from that Danny Kaye-like Jester, Zizek) it is just a sidelight, that sometimes adds something to our view and otherwise can be safely ignored. As for Rajan on Shelley, my advice is to ignore it.
>
>
> Incidentally, for those who scoff at theory at such: Where does the
> Meaning of a text reside? What is a "Meaning"?
>
> Carrol