The Resistance to Theory

Paul de Man

This essay was not originally intended to address the question of teaching directly, although it was supposed to have a didactic and an educational function – which it failed to achieve. It was written at the request of the Committee on Research Activities of the Modern Language Association as a contribution to a collective volume entitled Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literatures. I was asked to write the section on literal theory. Such essays are expected to follow a clearly determined program; they are supposed to provide the reader with a select but comprehensive list of the main trends and publications in the field, to synthesize and classify the main problematic areas and to lay out a critical and programmatic projection of the solutions which can be expected in the foreseeable future – all this with a keen awareness that, ten years later, someone will be asked to repeat the same exercise.
I found it difficult to live up, in good faith, to the requirements of this program and could only try to explain, as concisely as possible, why the main theoretical interest of literary theory consists in the impossibility of its definition. The Committee rightly judged that this was an inauspicious way to achieve the pedagogical objectives of the volume and commissioned another article. I thought their decision altogether justified, as well as interesting in its implications for the teaching of literature. I tell this for two reasons: to explain the traces in the article of the original assignment which account for the awkwardness of trying to be more retrospective and more general than one can legitimately hope to be; because the predicament also reveals a question of general interest, that of the relationship between the scholarship, the theory and the teaching of literature.
Despite cursory opinion teaching is not primarily an intersubjective relationship between people, but a cognitive process in which self and other are only tangentially and contiguously involved. The only teaching worthy the name is scholarly, not personal; analogies between teaching and various aspects of show business or guidance counseling are most often excuses for having abdicated the task. Scholarship, in principle, has to be eminently teachable. In the case of literature such scholarship includes at least two complementary areas: historical and philological facts, as the preparatory condition for understanding, and methods of reading or interpretation. The latter is admittedly an open discipline, which nevertheless can hope to evolve by rational means and despite internal crises, controversies and polemics. As a controlled reflection on the formation of method, theory rightly proves to be entirely compatible with teaching, and one can think of numerous important theorists who are or were also prominent scholars. A question arises only if there is a tension between methods of understanding and the knowledge that those methods enable to achieve. If there is something about literature as such, which indeed allows a discrepancy between truth and method, then scholarship and theory are no longer necessarily compatible.
As a first casualty of this complication the notion of a literature as such as well as the clear distinction between history and interpretation can no longer be taken for granted. For a method that cannot be made to suit the truth of its object can only teach delusion. Various developments, not only in the contemporary scene but in the long and complicated history of literary and linguistic instruction, reveal symptoms which suggest that such a difficulty is an inherent focus of the discourse about literature. These uncertainties are manifest in the hostility directed at theory in the name of ethical and aesthetic values, as well as in the recuperative attempts of theorists to reassert their own subservience to these values. The most effective of these attacks will denounce theory as an obstacle to scholarship and, consequently, to teaching. It is worth examining whether, and why, this is the case. If it is, then it is better to fail in teaching what should not be taught, than to succeed in teaching what is not true.
A general statement about literary theory should not start from pragmatic considerations. It should address such questions as the definition of literature and discuss the distinction between literary and non-literary uses of language, as well as between literary and non-verbal forms of art. It should then proceed to the descriptive taxonomy of the various aspects and species of the literary genus and to the normative rules that are bound to follow from such a classification. Or, if one rejects a scholastic for a phenomenological model, one should attempt a phenomenology of the literary activity as writing, reading or both, or of the literary work as the product, the correlate of such an activity.
Whatever the approach taken (and several other theoretically justifiable starting-points can be imagined), it is certain that considerable difficulties will arise at once, difficulties that cut so deep that even the most elementary task of scholarship, the elimination of the corpus and the état présent of the question, is bound to end in confusion, not necessarily because the bibliography is so large but because it is impossible to fix its borderlines. Such predictable difficulties have not prevented many writers on literature from proceeding along theoretical rather than pragmatic lines, often with considerable success. It can be shown however that in all cases this success depends on the power of a system (philosophical, religious or ideological) that may well remain implicit, but that determines an a priori conception of what is literary by starting out from the premises of the system rather than from the literary thing itself – if such a „thing“ exists at all.
This last qualification is a real question, which in fact accounts for the predictability of the difficulties just alluded to: if the condition of existence of an entity is itself particularly critical, then the theory of this entity is bound to fall back into the pragmatic. The difficult and inconclusive history of literary theory indicates that this is indeed the case for literature in an even more manifest manner than for other verbalized occurrences, such as jokes or dreams. The attempt to treat literature theoretically may as well resign itself to the fact that it has to start out from empirical considerations.
Pragmatically speaking, we know that there has been, over the last fifteen to twenty years, a strong interest in something called „literary theory“ and that in the United States this interest has at times coincide with the importation and reception of foreign, continental influences. We also know that this wave of interest now seems to be receding, as some satiation or disappointment sets in after the initial enthusiasm. Such an ebb and flow is natural enough; it is still significant in this case, because it makes the depth of the resistance to literary theory so manifest. It is a recurrent strategy of any anxiety to defuse what it considers threatening by magnification or minimization, by attributing to it claims to power of which it is bound to fall short. If a cat is called a tiger it can easily be dismissed as a paper tiger; the question remains why one was so scared of the cat in the first place. The same tactic works in reverse: calling the cat a mouse and then deriding it for its pretense to be mighty. Rather than being drawn into this polemical whirlpool, it might be better to call the cat a cat and to document, however briefly, the contemporary version of the resistance to theory in this century.
The predominant trends in North American literary criticism before the nineteen-sixties were certainly not averse to theory, if by theory one understands the rooting of literal exegesis and of critical evaluation in a system of some conceptual generality. Even the most intuitive, empirical and theoretically low-key writers on literature made use of a minimal set of concepts (tone, organic form, allusion, tradition, historical situation etc.) of at least some general import. In several other cases the interest in theory was publicly asserted and practiced. A broadly shared methodology, more or less overtly proclaimed, aligned such influential text books of the era, as Understanding Poetry (Brooks and Warren), Theory of Literature (Wellek and Warren) and The Fields of Light (Reuben Brower), or similarly oriented works like The Mirror and the Lamp, Language as Gesture and The Verbal Icon.
Yet, with the possible exception of Kenneth Burke and, in some respects, Northrop Frye, none of these authors would have considered themselves theorists in a contemporary sense of the term, nor did their work provoke as strong reactions, positive or negative, as that of later theorists. There were polemics, not doubt, and differences in approach that cover a wide spectrum of divergencies, still the fundamental curriculum of literary studies as well as the talent and training expected for them were not being seriously challenged. Other approaches, like those linked to New Criticism, experienced no difficulty fitting into the academic establishments, without their proponents having to betray their literary sensibilities in any way and with some of them successfully pursuing careers as poets or novelists; nor did they find themselves in conflict with a national tradition which, though less tyrannical than its European counterparts, is certainly far from powerless.
The perfect representative of New Criticism, so far, is T.S. Eliot, a combination of original talent, traditional education, wit and serenity, an Anglo-American blend of intellectual gentility – without being too repressed to afford tantalizing glimpses of darker psychic and political grounds, but without breaking the surface of an ambivalent decorum that has its own complacencies and seductions. The normative principles of such a literary ambience are cultural and ideological rather than theoretical – oriented towards the integrity of a social and historical self, rather than towards the impersonal consistency that theory requires. Culture allows for, indeed advocates, a degree of cosmopolitanism, and the literary spirit of the American Academy of the fifties was anything but provincial. It had no difficulty appreciating and assimilating outstanding works of a kindred spirit that originated in Europe: Curtius, Auerbach, Croce, Sitzer, Alonso, Valéry and even Sartre. The inclusion of Sartre in this list is important, for it indicates that the dominant cultural code we are trying to evoke cannot simply be assimilated to a political polarity of the left and the right, of academic and non-academic, Greenwich Village and Gambier, Ohio. Politically oriented and predominantly non-academic journals, of which the Partisan Review remains the best example, did not (with all proper reservations and distinctions) stand in any genuine opposition to the New Criticism’s approaches. The broad, though negative, consensus that brings these extremely diverse trends and individuals together is their shared resistance to theory. This diagnosis derives from the arguments and complicities that have since come to light in a more articulate opposition to the mutual counterpart.
The relevance of these considerations would be at most anecdotal (the historical impact of twentieth-century literary discussion being so slight), if it were not for the theoretical implications of the resistance to theory. The local manifestations of this resistance are themselves sufficiently systematic to warrant one’s interest.
What is it that is being threatened by those approaches to literature that developed during the sixties and which now, under various designations, make up the somewhat chaotic field of literary theory? These approaches cannot be simply equated with any particular method or country. Structuralism was not the only trend to dominate that field, not even in France, and structuralism as well as semiology are inseparable from prior tendencies in the Slavic domain. In Germany the main impulses have come from other directions, from the so-called Frankfurter Schule and more orthodox Marxists, from Post-Husserlian phenomenology and Post-Heideggerian hermeneutics, with only minor inroads made by structural analysis. All these trends have had their share of influence in the United States, in more or less productive combinations with nationally rooted concerns. Only a nationally or personally competitive view of history would wish to hierarchize such movements, as hard to label as they are. The possibility of practicing literary theory, which is by no means to be taken for granted, has itself become a carefully considered question, and those who have progressed furthest in this respect are the most controversial, but also the best sources of information. This certainly includes several of the names loosely connected with structuralism, broadly enough defined to include Saussure, Jakobson and Barthes, as well as Greimes and Althusser; that is to say, so broadly defined as to be no longer of use as a meaningful historical term.
Literary theory can be said to come into being when the approach to literary texts is no longer based on non-linguistic, that is, historical and aesthetic considerations or, to put it less crudely, when the object of discussion is no longer the meaning or the value but the modalities of production and of reception of meaning and of value, prior to their establishment – the implication being that this establishment is problematic enough to require an autonomous discipline, that is, the critical investigation of its possibility and its status. Literary history, even when considered distinctly remote from the platitudes of positivistic historicism, is still the history of an understanding which at least as a virtuality is taken for granted. The question of the relationship between aesthetics and meaning is more complex, since aesthetics apparently has to do with the effect of meaning rather than with its content per se. Aesthetics, ever since its development with Kant, is a phenomenalism of the process of meaning and understanding; and it may be naive, in that it postulates a phenomenology of art and of literature which may well be what is at issue: aesthetics is part of a universal system of philosophy rather than a specific theory.
In the nineteenth-century tradition Nietzsche’s challenge of the system – established by Kant and Hegel – is a version of the general question of philosophy. Nietzsche’s critique of metaphysics includes, or starts out from, the aesthetics, and the same could be argued for Heidegger. The calling of prestigious names does not intimate that the recent development of literary theory is a by-product of larger philosophical speculations. In some rare cases a direct link may exist between philosophy and literary theory. More frequently contemporary literary theory is a relatively autonomous version of questions that also surface, in different contexts, in philosophy, though not necessarily in a clearer and more rigorous form. Philosophy in England as well as on the Continent is less freed from traditional patterns than it sometimes pretends to believe, and the prominent though never dominant place of aesthetics among the main components of the system is a constitutive part of this system. It is therefore not surprising that contemporary literary theory came into being from outside philosophy and sometimes in deliberate rebellion against the weight of its tradition. Literary theory may now have become a legitimate concern of philosophy, but it cannot be assimilated to it, neither factually nor hypothetically. It contains a necessarily pragmatic moment that certainly weakens it as theory but that adds a subversive element of unpredictability and makes it something of a wild card in the serious game of the theoretical disciplines.
The advent of theory – the break that is so often being deplored and that sets it aside from literary history and from literary criticism – comes along with the introduction of linguistic terminology in the metalanguage about literature. By „linguistic terminology“ one has to understand a terminology that designates reference prior to designating the referent and takes into account the referential function or, to be more specific, that considers reference as a function of language and not necessarily as an intuition. Intuition implies perception, consciousness, experience, and it leads at once into the world of logic and understanding, with all its correlatives among which aesthetics occupies a prominent place. The assumption that there can be a science of language which is not specifically logical, demands the development of a terminology which is not necessarily aesthetic. Literary theory has to come into its own in an approach such as the application of Saussurian linguistics to literary texts.
The affinity between structural linguistics and literary texts is – in historical terms – not as obvious as it may now seem. Peirce, Saussure, Sapir and Bloomfeld were not originally concerned with literature but with the scientific foundations of linguistics. Only the interest of philologists like Jakobson or semiologists like Barthes reveals the natural attraction of literature to a theory of linguistic signs. By considering language a system of signs and of signification rather than an established pattern of meanings, one displaces or even suspends the traditional barriers between literary and presumably non-literary uses of language and liberates the corpus from the secular weight of textual canonization. The results of the encounter between semiology and literature went considerably further than those of many other theoretical models – philological, psychological or classically epistemological – which writers on literature in quest of such models had tried out before. The responsiveness of literary texts to semiotic analysis is visible in that – whereas other approaches were unable to reach beyond observations that could be paraphrased or translated in terms of common knowledge – these analyses revealed patterns that could just be described in terms of their own, specifically linguistic terms. The linguistics of semiology and of literature apparently have something in common that only their mutual perspective can detect and that pertains distinctively to them. The definition of that „something“, often referred to as literariness, has become the object of literary theory.
Literariness is usually misunderstood in a way that has provoked much of the confusion which dominates today’s polemics. It is assumed for instance that „literariness“ is another word for – or another mode of – aesthetic response. The use, in conjunction with literariness, of such terms as „style“ or „stylistics“, „form“ or even „poetry“, all of which carry strong aesthetic connotations, helps to foster this confusion, not the least among those who put that term in circulation. Roland Barthes – in an essay, properly and revealingly dedicated to Jakobson – speaks eloquently of the writer’s quest for a perfect coincidence of the phonic properties of a word with its signifying function: „We would also like to insist on the Cratylism of the name (and of the sign) in Proust … Proust sees the relationship between signifier and signified as motivated, the one copying the other and representing in its material form the signified essence of things (and not the thing itself) … This realism (in the scholastic sense of the word), conceiving names as a copy of ideas, has taken a radical form … But one may ask, whether it is not more or less consciously present in all writing and whether it is possible to be a writer without some sort of belief in a natural relationship between names and essences.“¹ To the extent that Cratylism assumes a convergence of the phenomenal aspects of language – like sound – with its signifying function as referent, it is an aesthetically oriented conception; in fact, one could consider aesthetic theory, including its most systematic elaboration with Hegel, as a complete unfolding of the model of which the Cratylian concept of language is one version.
Hegel’s rather cryptic reference to Plato, in his Aesthetics, may be interpreted in this sense. Barthes and Jakobson often seem to suggest a purely aesthetic reading; yet, their position partly hints in the opposite direction. The convergence of sound and meaning celebrated by Barthes – regarding Proust, though dismantled by Proust himself as a temptation to mystified minds –² is also to be seen as an effect which language can perfectly well achieve, but which bares no substantial relationship – by analogy or ontologically realistic imitation – to anything beyond that particular effect. It is rather a rhetorical question, not an aesthetic function of language, an identifiable trope (paronomasia) that operates on the level of the signifier and contains no responsible pronouncement on the nature of the world, despite its strong potential to create that illusion. The phenomenality of the signifier, like sound, is undoubtedly involved in the correspondence between the name and the thing named, but the link – the relationship between word and thing – is not phenomenal but conventional.
This gives any particular language a significant freedom from referential restraint, though it makes it epistemologically suspect and highly volatile, since its use can no longer be said to be determined by considerations of truth and falsehood, good and evil, beauty and ugliness, pleasure and pain. Whenever this autonomous potential of language can be revealed by analysis, we are dealing with literariness and, in fact, with literature as the place where this negative knowledge about the reliability of linguistic utterance is made available. The ensuing foregrounding of material, phenomenal aspects of the signifier creates a strong illusion of aesthetic seduction at the very moment when the actual aesthetic function has been, at least, suspended. It is inevitable that semiology or similarly oriented methods be considered formalistic, in the sense of being valorized aesthetically rather than semantically; but the inevitability of such an interpretation does not make it less aberrant. Literature implies the voiding rather than the affirmation of aesthetic categories. One consequence is that, whereas traditionally we have been accustomed to reading literature by analogy to plastic arts or music, we now have to recognize the necessity of a non-perceptual, linguistic moment in painting and music – and learn to read pictures rather than to imagine meaning.
If literariness is not an aesthetic quality, it is also primarily mimetic. Mimesis becomes one trope among others: a language choosing to imitate a non-verbal entity, just as paronomasia imitates a sound without any claim to identity – or reflection on difference – between the verbal and non-verbal elements. The most misleading notion of literariness – also perhaps the most recurrent objection to any literary theory – considers it pure verbalism, a denial of the reality principle on behalf of absolute fiction, even more, for reasons that are supposed to be ethically and politically shameful. The attack mirrors the anxiety of the aggressors rather than the guilt of the accused. By admitting the necessity of non-phenomenal linguistics, one exempts the discourse on literature from naive opposition between fiction and reality, which are themselves an offspring of an uncritical conception of art as a mimetic ambition. In genuine semiology as well as in other linguistically defined theories the referential function of language is not being denied at all; what is actually compromised is its authority as a model for natural or phenomenal cognition. Literature is fiction not because it refuses to acknowledge reality, but because it is not a priori certain that language functions according to principles which are those – or like those – of the phenomenal world. It is therefore not a priori certain that literature is a reliable source of information about anything but its own language.
It would be unfortunate, for example, to confuse the materiality of the signifier with the materially of what it signifies. This may seem obvious enough on the level of light and sound, but it is less so with regard to the more general phenomenality of space and time, especially of the self; no one in his right mind will try to grow grapes by the luminosity of the word „day“, but it is very difficult not to conceive the pattern of one’s past and future existence in accordance with temporal and spatial schemes that belong to fictional narratives and not to the world. This does not mean that fictional narratives are not part of the world and of reality; their impact upon the world may be all too strong. What we call „ideology“ is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenon. It follows that, more than any other mode of inquiry – including economics –, the linguistics of literariness is a powerful and indispensable tool in the unmasking of ideological aberrations as well as a determining factor of detecting them already. Those who reproach literary theory for being oblivious to social and historical reality, are just revealing their fear of having their own ideological mystifications exposed by the very tool they are trying to discredit.
In this perhaps all too cursive review of arguments we begin to find some answer to the initial question: what is it about literary theory that is so threatening, that it provokes this strong resistance? It confounds the principles of ideology – deeply rooted, as they are – by disclosing their mechanism; it goes against a powerful tradition – not only a philosophical one – of which aesthetics is a prominent part; it upsets the canon of literary works and blurs the borderline between literary and non-literary discourse – implicitly compromising the connection between ideology and philosophy. All this may be a sufficient reason for suspicion, it is not a satisfying answer to our question: it makes the tension between literary theory and the tradition of literary studies appear as a mere conflict between two modes of thought that happen to appear on the stage at the same time. If the conflict is only historical in the literal sense, it is of limited theoretical interest, a passing squall in the intellectual weather of the world. As a matter of fact, the arguments in favour of the legitimacy of literary theory are so compelling, that it seems useless to bother about the conflict at all. Certainly none of the objections to theory, presented again and again, misinformed or based on crude misunderstandings of such terms as „mimesis“, „fiction“, „ideology“, „reference“ and, for that matter, „relevance“, can be said to be of genuine rhetorical interest.
However, it may be that the development of literary theory is itself overdetermined by complications inherent to its very project und unsettling with regard to its status as a scientific discipline. Resistance may be a constituent of its discourse, in a manner that would be inconceivable in the natural sciences and unmentionable in the social sciences. It may be, in other words, that the polemical opposition, the systematic misunderstanding and misrepresentation, the unsubstantial but eternally recurrent objections are the relegated symptoms of a resistance implicit to the theoretical enterprise itself. To claim that this would be sufficient reason not to contemplate practicing literary theory after all, would be like rejecting anatomy because it has failed to cure mortality. The real debate of literary theory is not with its polemical opponents but with its own methodological assumptions and possibilities. Rather than asking why literary theory is threatening, we should perhaps ask why it has such difficulty going about its business and why it lapses so readily either into the manner of justification and defense or into the overcompensation of programmatic utopianism. Such insecurity about its own ambition calls for self-analysis, if one is to understand the frustrations that affect its practitioners, even when they seem to dwell in self-assuring methodology.
If these difficulties are indeed an integral part of the problem, then they must be ahistorical. The way in which they are encountered on the present literary scene – as a resistance to the introduction of linguistic terminology in aesthetic and historical discourse about literature – is only a particular version of a problem that can’t be reduced to a specific historical situation, considered modern, postmodern, postclassical or romantic – although its obsessive way of forcing itself upon us in the guise of historical periodization, is certainly part of its problematic nature. Such difficulties can be read in literary theory at all times, at whatever historical moment one likes to choose. One of the main achievements of the present theoretical trends is to have restored some awareness of this fact. Literary theory, whether it concerns classical, medieval or Renaissance texts, is now being read in a way that knows enough about what it is doing not to wish to call itself „modern“.
We return to the original question in an attempt to broaden the discussion, so to inscribe the polemics into the question rather than having them determine it. The resistance to theory is a resistance to the use of language about language. It is therefore a resistance to language itself or to the possibility that language contains factors or functions that cannot be reduced to intuition. We seem to assume all too easily that, when we refer to what is called „language“, we know what we are talking about, although there is probably no word to be found in language that is as overdetermined, self-evasive, disfigured and disfiguring as „language“. Even if we choose to consider it somehow safely detached from any theoretical model, in the pragmatic history of language – not as a concept but as a didactic assignment that no human being can bypass –, we soon feel ourselves confronted with theoretical enigmas. The most familiar and general of all linguistic models, the classical trivium, which understood language – that is, its mastering – as consisting of grammar, rhetoric and logic, was actually a set of unresolved tensions, strong enough to have generated a prolonged discourse of endless frustration, of which literary theory – as the contemporary version of that understanding of language – is just one more chapter.
The difficulties extend to the internal articulations between the constituent parts as well as the articulation of the field of language with the knowledge of the world in general, the link between trivium and quadrivium, which covers the non-verbal sciences of number (arithmetic), of space (geometry), of motion (astronomy) and of time (music). In the history of philosophy this link is traditionally – and substantially – accomplished by way of logic, the area where the rigor of the linguistic discourse about itself matches with the rigor of the mathematical discourse about the world. Seventeenth-century epistemology for example, at a time when the relationship between philosophy and mathematics was particularly close, held the discourse of geometry (mos geometricus) – which included the homogeneous concatenation between space, time and number – as the sole model of coherence and economy. Reasoning more geometrico was said to be „almost the only mode of reasoning that is infallible, because it is the only one to adhere to the true method, whereas all the other ones are by natural necessity in a degree of confusion of which geometrical minds alone can be aware“.³
This is a clear instance of the interconnection between a science of the phenomenal world and a science of language, conceived as definitional logic, the precondition for a correct axiomatic-deductive, synthetic reasoning. The possibility of thus circulating freely between logic and mathematics has its own complex and problematic history as well as its contemporary equivalences with a different logic and a different mathematics. What matters for our argument is that this circulation of the sciences of language with the mathematical sciences represents a particularly compelling version of a continuity between a theory of language, like logic, and the knowledge of the phenomenal world to which mathematics gives access. In such a system the place of aesthetics is preordained and by no means alien, provided the priority of logic – according to the model of the trivium – is not being questioned. Even if one assumes, for the sake of argument and against much of the historical evidence, that the link between logic and natural sciences is secure, it leaves open – within the confines of the trivium itself – the question of the relationship between grammar, rhetoric and logic. This is the point at which literariness, the use of language that foregrounds the rhetorical over the grammatical and the logical function, intervenes as a decisive but unsettling element which, in a variety of modes and aspects, disrupts the inner balance of that model and consequently its extension to the nonverbal world.
Logic and grammar seem to be connected in terms of a sufficiently natural affinity, and within a certain Cartesian tradition the grammarians of Port-Royal had little difficulty with being also logicians. The very claim persists today in most different methods and terminologies that maintain the same orientation towards the universality shared by logic and science. Answering those who see the singularity of specific texts in opposition to the general scientificity of the semiotic project, A.J. Greimas disputes the right to use the grandeur of grammar to describe a reading that would not be committed to universality. And those who have doubts about the semiotic method, he writes, „postulate the necessity of constructing a grammar for each particular text. But the essential property of a grammar is its ability to account for a large number of texts, and the metaphorical use of the term … fails to hide the fact that one has actually given up on the semiotic project“.⁴ There is instead no doubt that what is here prudently called „a large number“ implies the hope of a future model that would be applicable to the generation of all texts. Again, it is not our purpose to discuss the validity of this methodological optimism, but merely to offer it as an instance of the persistent symbiosis between grammar and logic. It is clear that, for Greimas as for the entire tradition to which he belongs, the grammatical and the logical functions of language are coextensive. Grammar is an isotope of logic.
In consequence, and as long as it remains founded on grammar, any theory of language, including a literary one, does not violate what we hold to be the underlying principle of all cognitive and aesthetic linguistic systems. Grammar stands in the service of logic which, in turn, allows for the passage to the knowledge of the world. The study of grammar – the first of the arts liberales – is the necessary condition for scientific and humanistic knowledge. As long as it leaves this principle intact, there is nothing threatening about literary theory. The continuity between theory and phenomenalism is asserted and preserved by the system itself. Difficulties occur only when it is no longer possible to ignore the epistemological thrust of the rhetorical dimension of discourse, that is, when it is no longer possible to keep it in its place as a mere adjunct, a mere ornament within the semantic function.
The uncertain relationship between grammar and rhetoric – as opposed to that between grammar and logic – is apparent, again according to the trivium, in the uncertain status of figures of speech or tropes, a component of language that straddles the disputed borderlines between the two areas. Tropes used to be part of the study of grammar but were considered to be the semantic agent of the specific function – or effect – that rhetoric performs as persuasion as well as meaning. Tropes, unlike grammar, pertain primordially to language; they are text-producing functions that are not necessarily compatible with non-verbal references, whereas grammar is by definition capable of extra-linguistic generalization. The latent tension between rhetoric and grammar precipitates into the problem or reading, the process that necessarily partakes of both. It turns out that the resistance to theory is a resistance to reading, a resistance that, in terms of contemporary studies, is perhaps most effective in the methodologies that call themselves „theories of reading“ and nevertheless avoid the function they claim as their object.
What does it mean when we assert that the study of literary texts is necessarily dependent on an act of reading or when we claim that this act is being systematically avoided? It is certainly more than the tautology that one has to have read at least some parts of a text – or to read even a text about that text – in order to make a statement about it. Stressing the seemingly self-evident necessity of reading implies two things: that literature is not a transparent message in which it can be taken for granted that the distinction between the message and the means of communication is clearly established; and, more programmatically, that the grammatical decoding of a text leaves a residue of indetermination that has to be but cannot be resolved by grammatical means, however extensively conceived. The extension of grammar to include parafigural dimensions is in fact the most remarkable and debatable strategy of contemporary semiology, especially in the study of syntagmatic and narrative structures. The codification of contextual elements, well beyond the syntactical limits of the sentence, leads to the systematic study of metaphrastic dimensions and has considerably refined and expanded the knowledge of textual codes. It is equally clear that this extension is always strategically directed towards the replacement of rhetorical figures by grammatical codes. This tendency to replace a rhetorical by a grammatical terminology (in case of hypotaxis, for instance, to designate anamorphic or metonymic tropes) is part of an explicit program – that is entirely admirable in its intent, since it tends towards the mastering and the clarification of meaning. The replacement of a hermeneutic by a semiotic model, of interpreting by decoding, would represent a considerable progress, in view of the historical instability of textual meanings, including those of canonical texts. Much of the reluctance against reading could be dispelled.
The argument can be made that no grammatical decoding, however refined, could claim to reach the determining figural dimensions of a text. There are elements in each one that are by no means ungrammatical but whose semantic function is not grammatically definable, neither in themselves nor in context. This annulment of theory – the disturbance of a cognitive field which extends from grammar to logic to the general science of man and of the phenomenal world – may turn into a theoretical project of rhetorical analysis, that would reveal the inadequacy of grammatical models of non-reading. Rhetoric, by its conflictual relationship to grammar and to logic, certainly denies the claim of the trivium – by extension, of language – to be an epistemologically stable construct. The resistance to theory is a resistance to the rhetorical or tropological dimension of language, a dimension which may be more explicitly emphasized in literature, in its general sense, than in other verbal manifestations or, less vaguely, which can be revealed in any verbal enactment when it is perceived textually. Since grammar, as well as figuration, is an integral part of such perception, that is, of reading, this turns into a negative process in which the grammatical cognition will be annulled each time by its rhetorical displacement. The model of the trivium implies a pseudo-dialectic of its own annulment, and its history is defined by this dialectic.
This conclusion allows for a somewhat more systematic description of the contemporary theoretical scene. This scene is ruled by an increased emphasis on reading as a theoretical problem or, as it is sometimes erroneously phrased, on the reception rather than on the production of texts. It is in this area that the most fruitful exchanges have begun between writers and journals of various countries and that the most interesting dialogue has developed between literary theory and other disciplines, in the arts as well as in linguistics, philosophy and the social sciences. A straightforward report on the present situation of literary theory in the United States would have to point out the accent on reading – something that has been significant of New Criticism all along. The methods are now more technical, but the contemporary interest in the poetics of literature is clearly linked, traditionally enough, to the problems of reading. Since the models which are being used are no longer simply intentional and centered on an identifiable self, nor simply hermeneutic in terms of the one original, prefigurative text, it seems that this concentration on reading would lead to the rediscovery of the theoretical difficulties associated with rhetoric. This is the case – to some extent, but not quite. Perhaps the most instructive aspect of contemporary theory is the refinement of techniques by which the threat inherent to rhetorical analysis is being avoided at the very moment when the efficacy of these techniques has improved, so far that the rhetorical obstacles to understanding can no longer be mistranslated into thematic and phenomenalistic commonplaces. The resistance to theory which, as we saw, is a resistance to reading, appears in its most rigorous and elaborated form among the theorists of reading.
It would be an easy though lengthily process to show that this concerns those theorists in particular who are committed to the use of grammatical models or to traditional-hermeneutic models, which do not tend to problematize the phenomenalism of reading and therefore remain confined within a theory of literature rooted in aesthetics. Such an argument would be just plausible, because once a reader has become aware of the rhetorical dimensions of a text he will not be amiss in finding textual instances that are irreducible to grammar or to any historically determined meaning, provided he is willing to acknowledge what he is bound to notice. It would be more difficult to account for the mutual reluctance to admit the obvious; but the argument would have to become more elaborate, as it had to include a textual analysis.
Concerning those theorists who at least pretend avoiding rhetorics, we have witnessed in recent years a strong interest in certain elements of language whose function is not only independent from any phenomenalism but from any cognition – this function therefore excluding, at least suspending, the consideration of tropes, ideologies etc. from such form of reading that would be primarily performative. In some cases that function becomes evident trough a relation between performance, grammar, logic and stable reference, and the resulting theories are not essentially different from those of confirmed grammarians or semioticians. But the most astute practitioners of a speech-act defined theory of reading avoid this relapse and – rightly – insist on the necessity of keeping the actual performance of a speech act – being rather conventional than cognitive – separate from its causes and effects: in their own terminology, to keep the illocutionary force separate from its perlocutionary function. Rhetoric, understood as persuasion, is banished from the strictly performative moment and relegated to the area of affective perlocution.⁵
What raises some suspicion about this conclusion is that it basically rejects any persuasion – which is inseparable from rhetoric – and eventually incriminates any mode of mere verification. The attempt for stripping down rhetoric of its epistemological relevance would require that its tropological and figural functions were bypassed – as if rhetoric could be isolated from the general relevance shared with grammar and logic and instead be considered an instant correlative of that performative moment. Speech-act theories of reading do emphasize – most efficiently – the grammatical element of the trivium, at the expense of rhetoric: suggesting the performative element as sheer convention would reduce it to just one grammatical code among others. The relationship between trope and performance is actually closer, though perhaps rather disruptive, than it has been supposed here, so far; nor is this relationship properly understood by relating it to some creative aspect of performance. The performative impact of language can be called „accidental“, which would differ considerately from „conventional …“ as well as from „creatively constitutive“. Speech-act defined theories of reading function only to the extend that they pave the way for the very rhetorical reading they are supposed to prevent.
But the same would be true, even if an authentically rhetorical reading, cleared of phenomenalism or any inappropriately grammatical and performative codification of a text, could be conceived – which is not impossible and for which literary theory, with all its aims and methods, should definitely strive. Such a reading would indeed appear as a methodical dismantling of the grammatical construct and, in its systematic relegation of the trivium, might be theoretically plausible and effective. Rhetorical reading, in technically correct form, may be predictable and boring, but it is irrefutable. It is also totalizing (potentially totalitarian), since the structures and functions it exposes do not lead to the knowledge of a particular entity, whereas it works as a precarious process of comprehension that prevents anything particular, even in linguistic terms, from entering into discourse. Rhetorical reading therefore is one universal (in linguistic terms indeed) – a consistently defective model of language’s impossibility to be a model language.
We have to imagine a most elastic theoretical and dialectical model to end all models; and it implies, in its own defectiveness, all the other models of non-reading: referential, semiological, grammatical, performative, logical. It is theory and non-theory, the universal theory of the impossibility of theory. Nothing can overcome the resistance to theory, since theory itself is this resistance. Yet, literary theory will not perish; the language it speaks is the language of self-restraint.