‘The equally reasonable alternative’
Marc Redfield, Theory at Yale: The Strange Case of Deconstruction in America
Fordham University Press, 256pp, £21.99, ISBN 9780823268672
reviewed by Niall Gildea
Of the dubious consensuses that still obtain concerning ‘high theory’, one of the more curious is the worry that, if unchecked, it tends toward the amoral or downright unethical. This objection has been levelled from both left- and right-leaning positions: the former accuses ‘theory’ of enshrining a canon of ‘elite’ literature, for instance, whilst the latter suspects it of doing pretty much the opposite. These basic arguments against theory have mushroomed at various points to imply its complicity in or even active endorsement of misogyny and/or racism, and its complicity in or even active endorsement of the subordination of ‘literature’ to political correctness. The more alert among you will extrapolate quickly here, and arrive at the conclusion that, assuming ‘theory’ cannot be guilty of all of this at once, it must be the case that its antagonism partakes of the phantasmatic.
With a few exceptions (usually Roger Scruton), nobody on the right really writes anti-theory polemics any more. The death of Derrida, perhaps, signalled to many the end of this inconveniently fastidious and self-reflexive epoch in literary criticism (I know of at least one academic, a Classicist then at Oxford, who celebrated the occasion with a party). On the left, the line is that ‘we’ (it is always ‘we’ in literature departments) ought (it is always ‘ought’ in literature departments) to think about how some of the more communicable (read: easier to understand) insights achieved by the big beasts of theory might be put to work in a conscience-salving manner. This typically involves forcing gobbets of Deleuzean or Derridean hearsay into broadly ethical models – salvaging their usefulness from their overweening narcissism and inconsiderate deadness, whiteness and maleness.
A research community in which the amnesiac cherry-picking, or lotus-eating, of ‘theory’ is misrecognized as its scholarly assimilation is a bad thing for obvious reasons, but it is also a good thing because it constitutes a nice big wall of imbecility for astute people to enjoy knocking down. ‘Derrida-inspired’ readings of William Blake which at one time were published in major journals are funny, as are seminal books on Greek tragedy which advertise themselves as intimates of de Man and Derrida but do not cite their work even once. But a more serious problem will confront anyone seeking to re-describe ‘theory’ in historical terms: the question of Paul de Man’s posthumously-discovered wartime journalism. As recently as 2014, in Evelyn Barish’s apoplectic non-study The Double Life of Paul de Man, de Man’s journalism was cited not only as a means of discrediting his work from the outset (Barish freely admits she can’t be bothered learning to read it), but as a blockage specifically to historical inquiry where theory is concerned: the equation, one infers, is: the history of ‘theory’ = de Man’s wartime journalism. The stated thesis is that the detail of de Man’s work is irrelevant to the accuracy of the claim that it is built on the Nazi sympathies of an untrustworthy philanderer; the implied thesis is that the difficulty of de Man’s work all but confirms its ethical unscrupulousness. It is easy and advisable to dismiss Barish’s book, but the disquieting thing is that her preposterous money-spinner only rehearses, in the idiom of the National Enquirer, a familiar alibi by which ‘theory’ is quarantined.
Happily, correctives are beginning to emerge. Mark Currie’s elegant The Invention of Deconstruction (2013) studied in detail the tendentious construals of Derrida’s early work in the USA, and the contribution of these to a discernible critical methodology called ‘deconstruction’ or ‘deconstructionism’. Now, Marc Redfield’s Theory at Yale offers what reasonably can be called the first history for grown-ups of de Man’s time at Yale, and the galvanic effect this had on three other esteemed literary critics: Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller.
Redfield’s book essays the kind of form-content doubling which made its subject matter so exciting and maddening in the first place. That is, it could be called a local reception-history of de Man which testifies to its own relevance (and, more obliquely, ironizes itself) by being written in a critical idiom which is itself highly receptive of de Man’s oeuvre. As a study both of de Man’s synecdochal function in the ‘mediatization’ of theory, and of the mediation of de Man’s insights in the work of Bloom and Hartman in particular (‘the discourse of theory’, in the double genitive), the book’s intelligent and sensible commentary on these two events of reading indexes a thoughtful engagement with de Man’s corpus.
Redfield’s naming a note in Hartman’s Wordsworth’s Poetry (1964) ‘the oldest foundation wall’ of the Yale School, and his identification of de Man’s critique of Derrida in ‘The Rhetoric of Blindness’ (1971) as ‘the primal scene of “deconstruction in America”’, say much about the story being told here. This book is about the brief coagulation of deconstruction at Yale (a temporary edifice to which Derrida’s was a largely peripatetic contribution), whose enduring signature remains its extraordinary critique of the putative stasis into which critical discourse around European Romanticism, and the lyric in particular, had lapsed. But it is also concerned with qualifying the common view of the comparative minority of Bloom, Hartman and Hillis Miller in this story: in an early chapter, Redfield shows how Bloom and Hartman in the mid-70s required no help from de Man or Derrida to amass a healthy number of enemies for the perceived literary aspirations and aesthetic over-stretching of their work. Hillis Miller also had a knack for exasperating people in this decade, and Redfield offers a lucid and muscular commentary on his 1979 reading of Wordsworth’s ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ (entitled ‘On Edge: The Crossways of Contemporary Criticism’), which came off the back of almost a decade of disputation between Hillis Miller and MH Abrams, and prompted several years’ more.
Through these accounts of the contretemps occasioned by Bloom, Hartman and Hillis Miller, Redfield can convincingly demonstrate how, if 1979 was indeed the year in which ‘“deconstruction” irreversibly imposed itself as the synonym of “theory” in the American academic imagination’, the publication in that year of the Deconstruction and Criticism collection (comprising essays by the three of them, plus de Man, plus Derrida) ensured that the objections literary deconstruction would encounter in the USA had more diffuse histories than the more straightforward xenophobia which characterised a lot of its initial reception in the UK, where Bloom, Hartman and Hillis Miller were cast as ‘disciples’ of Derrida, and de Man was frequently ignored.
Supplementing the historiographical sobriety of Redfield’s book, though, there abound risky and seriously absorbing hypotheses concerning the singular intrigue of the Yale School. His chapter on Bloom is wonderful, beginning with well-known anecdotes about Bloom as a kind of critical ‘cyborg’, before twisting into a psychoanalytic reading which contends that Bloom’s world-famous powers of assimilation and recall actually bespeak a certain powerlessness – a traumatic primal scene of incorporation. One of the texts discernible in Bloom’s mainframe is shown to be de Man’s review of The Anxiety of Influence, which ingeniously argued that the psychological narrative shaping that book was in fact a displacement of the linguistic structure of the reading encounter (with wonderful immodesty, de Man calls this decisive anamorphosis of Bloom’s thesis ‘the equally reasonable alternative’). Bloom’s six novel terms for intertextual encounters (clinamen, tessera and so on) are actually manifestations of latent ones of a more familiar critical register (irony, synecdoche, metonymy, hyperbole, metaphor and metalepsis) – intratextual tropes being dreamt as events, or tropes troping themselves, with ‘influence’ becoming something like the Traumwerk through which the constitutive alienation of the reading process becomes an account of the greatness of the Western canon (although, to venture a quibble, Redfield is hasty to dismiss the increasingly pronounced centrality of Shakespeare to all of this as one of Bloom’s affectations). Redfield’s argument for the imprint of de Man in the Bloomian bios/BIOS, ingeniously mirrors the de Man review: just as de Man shows the importance of Bloom’s book to lie in its difference from itself, so in Redfield’s chapter the familiar figure of Bloom is shown to be a mythic translation of the haunted cyborg. De Man in both cases is the ghost in the machine.
This kind of phantasmatic construal of de Man is finally the overarching theme of Theory at Yale, and the book is to be commended for taking seriously the suspicion and outright fear of him one encountered in this period. This magnanimity is most clearly perceived in Redfield’s penultimate chapter, a lengthy reading of John Guillory’s well-known critique of de Man in his Cultural Capital (1993). The Guillory case-study is astutely chosen, because here is a refutation of de Man which in many ways is very fine, and yet which sporadically loses its head precisely where it would insist that de Man, synecdoche of Theory, is wrong. In Guillory’s case, this insistence is necessary because he thinks de Man symptomatic of the bureaucratisation of the literary curriculum (an example of the regulation of cultural capital) by an emergent professional-managerial class, which of course is also wrong.
Guillory’s attempt is ‘to retrofit de Manian theory into a symptom of the marginalization of the humanities in the new technobureaucratic world’. De Man would be a defendant of ‘elite literature’; his theory would be the marketable defence of the same, based on a pablum of ‘watered down aspects of Continental thought.’ Except, as Redfield points out, nowhere does de Man prescribe which texts his ‘disciples’ (or anybody for that matter) ought to read – and what is more, his theory (and Guillory knows this) actually entails a radical questioning of any circumscription of literature or ‘the literary’.
Redfield’s argument is that the uncommonly self-reflexive qualities of rhetorical reading are shown up by the carelessness even of a critique as seminal as Guillory’s: ‘De Man’s text, once we have read Guillory reading it, stands revealed not as a blind repetition of its own institutional conditions of production, but rather as an elaborate machine for registering those conditions.’ Here is one similarity between de Man and Derrida: their work’s uncanny capacity to anticipate and undermine in advance attempts to denigrate it, to the point that these wind up being unwitting recommendations of the methodology they want to dispute. This pattern, so exciting and maddening in the first place, is elucidated admirably by Redfield’s impressive mediation.
With a few exceptions (usually Roger Scruton), nobody on the right really writes anti-theory polemics any more. The death of Derrida, perhaps, signalled to many the end of this inconveniently fastidious and self-reflexive epoch in literary criticism (I know of at least one academic, a Classicist then at Oxford, who celebrated the occasion with a party). On the left, the line is that ‘we’ (it is always ‘we’ in literature departments) ought (it is always ‘ought’ in literature departments) to think about how some of the more communicable (read: easier to understand) insights achieved by the big beasts of theory might be put to work in a conscience-salving manner. This typically involves forcing gobbets of Deleuzean or Derridean hearsay into broadly ethical models – salvaging their usefulness from their overweening narcissism and inconsiderate deadness, whiteness and maleness.
A research community in which the amnesiac cherry-picking, or lotus-eating, of ‘theory’ is misrecognized as its scholarly assimilation is a bad thing for obvious reasons, but it is also a good thing because it constitutes a nice big wall of imbecility for astute people to enjoy knocking down. ‘Derrida-inspired’ readings of William Blake which at one time were published in major journals are funny, as are seminal books on Greek tragedy which advertise themselves as intimates of de Man and Derrida but do not cite their work even once. But a more serious problem will confront anyone seeking to re-describe ‘theory’ in historical terms: the question of Paul de Man’s posthumously-discovered wartime journalism. As recently as 2014, in Evelyn Barish’s apoplectic non-study The Double Life of Paul de Man, de Man’s journalism was cited not only as a means of discrediting his work from the outset (Barish freely admits she can’t be bothered learning to read it), but as a blockage specifically to historical inquiry where theory is concerned: the equation, one infers, is: the history of ‘theory’ = de Man’s wartime journalism. The stated thesis is that the detail of de Man’s work is irrelevant to the accuracy of the claim that it is built on the Nazi sympathies of an untrustworthy philanderer; the implied thesis is that the difficulty of de Man’s work all but confirms its ethical unscrupulousness. It is easy and advisable to dismiss Barish’s book, but the disquieting thing is that her preposterous money-spinner only rehearses, in the idiom of the National Enquirer, a familiar alibi by which ‘theory’ is quarantined.
Happily, correctives are beginning to emerge. Mark Currie’s elegant The Invention of Deconstruction (2013) studied in detail the tendentious construals of Derrida’s early work in the USA, and the contribution of these to a discernible critical methodology called ‘deconstruction’ or ‘deconstructionism’. Now, Marc Redfield’s Theory at Yale offers what reasonably can be called the first history for grown-ups of de Man’s time at Yale, and the galvanic effect this had on three other esteemed literary critics: Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman and J. Hillis Miller.
Redfield’s book essays the kind of form-content doubling which made its subject matter so exciting and maddening in the first place. That is, it could be called a local reception-history of de Man which testifies to its own relevance (and, more obliquely, ironizes itself) by being written in a critical idiom which is itself highly receptive of de Man’s oeuvre. As a study both of de Man’s synecdochal function in the ‘mediatization’ of theory, and of the mediation of de Man’s insights in the work of Bloom and Hartman in particular (‘the discourse of theory’, in the double genitive), the book’s intelligent and sensible commentary on these two events of reading indexes a thoughtful engagement with de Man’s corpus.
Redfield’s naming a note in Hartman’s Wordsworth’s Poetry (1964) ‘the oldest foundation wall’ of the Yale School, and his identification of de Man’s critique of Derrida in ‘The Rhetoric of Blindness’ (1971) as ‘the primal scene of “deconstruction in America”’, say much about the story being told here. This book is about the brief coagulation of deconstruction at Yale (a temporary edifice to which Derrida’s was a largely peripatetic contribution), whose enduring signature remains its extraordinary critique of the putative stasis into which critical discourse around European Romanticism, and the lyric in particular, had lapsed. But it is also concerned with qualifying the common view of the comparative minority of Bloom, Hartman and Hillis Miller in this story: in an early chapter, Redfield shows how Bloom and Hartman in the mid-70s required no help from de Man or Derrida to amass a healthy number of enemies for the perceived literary aspirations and aesthetic over-stretching of their work. Hillis Miller also had a knack for exasperating people in this decade, and Redfield offers a lucid and muscular commentary on his 1979 reading of Wordsworth’s ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ (entitled ‘On Edge: The Crossways of Contemporary Criticism’), which came off the back of almost a decade of disputation between Hillis Miller and MH Abrams, and prompted several years’ more.
Through these accounts of the contretemps occasioned by Bloom, Hartman and Hillis Miller, Redfield can convincingly demonstrate how, if 1979 was indeed the year in which ‘“deconstruction” irreversibly imposed itself as the synonym of “theory” in the American academic imagination’, the publication in that year of the Deconstruction and Criticism collection (comprising essays by the three of them, plus de Man, plus Derrida) ensured that the objections literary deconstruction would encounter in the USA had more diffuse histories than the more straightforward xenophobia which characterised a lot of its initial reception in the UK, where Bloom, Hartman and Hillis Miller were cast as ‘disciples’ of Derrida, and de Man was frequently ignored.
Supplementing the historiographical sobriety of Redfield’s book, though, there abound risky and seriously absorbing hypotheses concerning the singular intrigue of the Yale School. His chapter on Bloom is wonderful, beginning with well-known anecdotes about Bloom as a kind of critical ‘cyborg’, before twisting into a psychoanalytic reading which contends that Bloom’s world-famous powers of assimilation and recall actually bespeak a certain powerlessness – a traumatic primal scene of incorporation. One of the texts discernible in Bloom’s mainframe is shown to be de Man’s review of The Anxiety of Influence, which ingeniously argued that the psychological narrative shaping that book was in fact a displacement of the linguistic structure of the reading encounter (with wonderful immodesty, de Man calls this decisive anamorphosis of Bloom’s thesis ‘the equally reasonable alternative’). Bloom’s six novel terms for intertextual encounters (clinamen, tessera and so on) are actually manifestations of latent ones of a more familiar critical register (irony, synecdoche, metonymy, hyperbole, metaphor and metalepsis) – intratextual tropes being dreamt as events, or tropes troping themselves, with ‘influence’ becoming something like the Traumwerk through which the constitutive alienation of the reading process becomes an account of the greatness of the Western canon (although, to venture a quibble, Redfield is hasty to dismiss the increasingly pronounced centrality of Shakespeare to all of this as one of Bloom’s affectations). Redfield’s argument for the imprint of de Man in the Bloomian bios/BIOS, ingeniously mirrors the de Man review: just as de Man shows the importance of Bloom’s book to lie in its difference from itself, so in Redfield’s chapter the familiar figure of Bloom is shown to be a mythic translation of the haunted cyborg. De Man in both cases is the ghost in the machine.
This kind of phantasmatic construal of de Man is finally the overarching theme of Theory at Yale, and the book is to be commended for taking seriously the suspicion and outright fear of him one encountered in this period. This magnanimity is most clearly perceived in Redfield’s penultimate chapter, a lengthy reading of John Guillory’s well-known critique of de Man in his Cultural Capital (1993). The Guillory case-study is astutely chosen, because here is a refutation of de Man which in many ways is very fine, and yet which sporadically loses its head precisely where it would insist that de Man, synecdoche of Theory, is wrong. In Guillory’s case, this insistence is necessary because he thinks de Man symptomatic of the bureaucratisation of the literary curriculum (an example of the regulation of cultural capital) by an emergent professional-managerial class, which of course is also wrong.
Guillory’s attempt is ‘to retrofit de Manian theory into a symptom of the marginalization of the humanities in the new technobureaucratic world’. De Man would be a defendant of ‘elite literature’; his theory would be the marketable defence of the same, based on a pablum of ‘watered down aspects of Continental thought.’ Except, as Redfield points out, nowhere does de Man prescribe which texts his ‘disciples’ (or anybody for that matter) ought to read – and what is more, his theory (and Guillory knows this) actually entails a radical questioning of any circumscription of literature or ‘the literary’.
Redfield’s argument is that the uncommonly self-reflexive qualities of rhetorical reading are shown up by the carelessness even of a critique as seminal as Guillory’s: ‘De Man’s text, once we have read Guillory reading it, stands revealed not as a blind repetition of its own institutional conditions of production, but rather as an elaborate machine for registering those conditions.’ Here is one similarity between de Man and Derrida: their work’s uncanny capacity to anticipate and undermine in advance attempts to denigrate it, to the point that these wind up being unwitting recommendations of the methodology they want to dispute. This pattern, so exciting and maddening in the first place, is elucidated admirably by Redfield’s impressive mediation.