Mihaela Ursa

Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj, Romania

 

 

Fictions of the subject in the imaginary of contemporary theory

 

 

Abstract: The paper starts from the idea that in their texts, critics project their own fictions about “what the author looks like”. Critical texts become inter-subjective spaces in which both the limits of one’s projective abilities and the phantasm of the author are tested. To do this, an idea of free philosophical subject is needed. The paper deals with how some trends of American theory project this idea of philosophical subject in opposition to what the same American theorists believe the European theoretical subject to be. The comparison is not merely geographical, but also cultural, since what emerges is a real American theoretical imaginary of what “the subject” looks like in the two given spaces and of how it modifies its attributes when imported from one space to another.

Keywords: American / European literary theory, author, subject, theoretical fictions

 

 

The impact of structuralism and post-structuralism on literary theory and criticism was so powerful, that it completely changed how we viewed the work of literature. Interpretations were declared invalid and even impossible, the author was declared unknown and then even dead, meaning itself was declared not only non-immanent, but also a whimsical linguistic deposit of traces and differences (and differances as well). I intend to point out the fact that certain trends in American theory and criticism after post-structuralism hold on to what a European scholar might consider anachronistic, that is to a notion of free philosophical subject, mostly visible in their treatment of the authorial subject or, as I call it, the authorial fiction. It is my contention that for some of the contemporary American theorists and critics, the subject is being re-instated as a necessary fiction, in the sense Nietzsche gives to the phrase “useful fictions” in The Will to Power. Of course, this new idea of a subject is not compatible with the pre-structuralist one: although it borrows traces of the latter’s description, it cannot be but an extremely vulnerable and hesitant, heterogeneous and discontinuous one, but nonetheless alive and free.

I tend to visualise “the critical relationship” as a kind of Rorschach test in which every critic is supposed to practically project his or her own ego towards the outside and at the same time to accept the “outside” of the text as a projection towards him- or herself. Some image of the author, some fiction of it appears in the imaginary of theory and criticism of all ages, as well as a supposition of presence is connected to the image of the critic in the imaginary of writers. Any critical act starts with a projective imagination exercise in which one’s image about herself meets the image about herself sent from the outside and, furthermore, in which some fiction of the subject sustains yet another fiction of the author. In this sense, one can only agree with Gadamer, who sees “pure vision” in any theory, since, from theoretical figures, the “author”, “the critic”, “the subject”, “the reader”, etc, become elements of the imaginary, intertwined and interdependent phantasms caught in the same moving and vibratile network.

Modern and post-modern Europe runs to salute every opportunity to attack the philosophical subject: it voluptuously cries out the death of God prophesied by Nietzsche, the death of man, announced by Michel Foucault, and the death of the author solemnly foretold by Roland Barthes. But for post-modern America, accepting these famous burials and giving up the anthropologizing of knowledge, as Foucault recommends in The Order of Things, seems to be an extremely difficult and hardly acceptable task. Americans find that “modernity starts with the incredible and, after all, unusable idea of a being who is sovereign precisely because it has been enslaved” (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982:30). I want to give only one example of how resistant American culture is to giving up the subject in knowledge, as well as to exiting the author and history from cultural investigation. One of the most reliable defenders of deconstruction in the ‘80-ies, Christopher Norris, writes in the ‘90-ies a paradoxical text. The text can be considered programmatic, but it would most certainly cause lots of malicious smiles and condescending grins on European faces. He starts from the idea that post-structuralism made it possible to refuse any kind of discourse about truth. After Saussure described language as a system “without positive terms”, after metaphysics was exposed as logo-centric and, finally, after any idea of knowledge was exposed as merely a discursive product of power, Norris feels at ease asserting that:

“there is something to worry about when a movement of thought gets so far out of touch with the standards and values, not to mention the common decencies – of open argumentative debate. All the more so when its followers make a habit of denouncing those bad old dogmatic (‘Enlightenment’) notions of truth, reason, critique, etc., while effectively placing their own ideas beyond the reach of criticism or counter-argument. […] If such arguments are valid, then there must be at least one truth claim exempted from the general (relativist) rule, i.e. the claim that ‘all truths are relative’, or again, that all arguments in the end come down to a matter of consensus belief. In the case of poststructuralism, the truths that enjoy this privileged status are those having to do with language (or ‘discourse’) as the ultimate horizon of intelligibility. Thus one simply has to accept, on pain of exclusion from the right-thinking fold – that language is a network of differential signs […], that reality is a ‘construct’ out of this or that language game […]. Thus spoke Saussure, and it is always the same few talismanic passages that are cited by way of scriptural warrant.” (Norris 1995:6)

The main reproach of American theorists to that philosophy which has parted with the subject is that philosophy itself thus becomes a useless instrument. Pragmatists by nature, Americans seems to quickly lose interest or to distrust any kind of theory that no longer serves anyone, let alone imagining the human being in the world. What can you do with it? The same simple question appears in American theorist over and over again. Just as prophetic as Norris, Gerald Graff hopes for an alternative to this kind of knowledge, for a post-modern philosophy that would move (both emotional, and dynamic) a world that has become as inert as “the ruins of an old civilisation” (1986:171). I think this is the kind of reaction that stays at the very foundation of the re-born interest for the figure of the author, both for the particular data of the author’s biography (as in cultural studies, gender studies, colonial and minorities studies, or in a novel that dissolves forms of autobiography) and for the author’s re-affirmation as useful and necessary fiction, as a free, self-conscious subject. When looking for a philosophical discourse to adopt, American theorists are mostly preoccupied by pragmatic values implied in the process of self-definition, by a functional and dynamic free individual oriented towards social change, effective action, purpose and utility. Knowledge, in the United States, bears the mark of “philosophical pragmatism and temperamental optimism” (Davis 1985:135), of  a “home made tradition of pragmatic historiography” (Thomas 1991:15) which made the solution “against theory” always a solution at hand. Brook Thomas translates this as: “how I learned to stop worrying about theory by forgetting it” (79).

Besides, there is a certain anti-intellectual component in American thinking, that was born out of the democratic refuse of any idea of elite and from a whole ideology based on egalitarianism (Hofstader 1963: 407). On the other hand, although they are not comfortable with elitist culture, American theorist and not only have a very distinct conscience of their own national exceptionalism. Being a liberal American means to agree with the exceptionalist idea that makes the United States the alpha and the omega of history: “the United States are at the end of history, with end implying both goal and completion” (Thomas 1991:X). In this vision, where the New World tears itself apart from old wicked Europe, novelty and newness become the keywords of the American destiny. Being an extraordinary space and time, it supplies the absence of history through a spatial phantasm of a new history (the New World).

Another factor that is to be taken into account if we are to analyse how American theory treats the death of the subject and author is the resistance to the institutionalization of any “counter-cultural” idea. When in crisis, one must seek for solutions inside, and not outside his space (i.e. Jeffersonian values will outreach cosmopolitan ones).

The arguments I made so far make it hard to understand how and why structuralism and post-structuralism were so popular in the United States but offer the background for the idea that American theory is extremely attached to the concepts in the constellation of the free subject. When concerned with knowledge, Europe and America operate with different types of logic: whereas in European theory, the ‘70-ies and even the ‘80-ies are about our need of epistemological clarification and confirmations, structuralism is imported over the ocean strictly for the purpose of filling a methodological gap. With New Criticism dead and buried in the late ‘50-ies, after its more than obvious failure in making criticism a credible science, American criticism finds it useful to import a verified method of scientific analysis in the form of structuralism. In other words, the two theoretical trends prove themselves useful to both European and Americans, but for different reasons. Still, a closer look will provide us with a point of unanimity: in both cases, structuralism and poststructuralism coincide with the need of taking a distance from metaphysics. But, while in Europe everything sounds almost melodramatic, for American theory this seems the only sensible thing to do. It is no coincidence that the images and metaphors that describe the European divorce from metaphysics belong to an apocalyptic imaginary: “the end”, “the death” (of man, subject, God, poetry, philosophy, etc., etc.), “the suicide”, “the hyper-real apocalypse”, “de-legitimatization” etc. This expressive and imaginal dramatism comes from the fact that, for centuries on end, philosophy meant, in Europe, a purpose on itself, while American theory is more in search of a “practical philosophy”, that is a philosophy that will help the individual pursue his personal happiness and fulfilment, a tool for establishing social harmony. A philosophical option will prove its validity only in its effectiveness to improve and better the welfare of the subject, its individual comfort.

On this idea, Art Berman imagines an intriguing description of the American theoretical field as composed of repeating cycles between an empiricist model (approved or disapproved with) and a trans-cultural intersection. “While American critics were moving toward a revigoration of concepts of freedom and a consequent focus on self-knowledge derived from personal examination, the French were moving away from such concepts toward a more sophisticated form of determinism, based on Marx and linguistics. This was structuralism. The two cultures were crossing, and structuralism was the crossroads at which they met (Roland Barthes periodically directing the traffic), both for a time in the same place but heading in different directions”. (Berman 1988: 91) Before structuralism, America is interested in a scientific psychology (for which the important thing is human behaviour and the extent to which it can be made intelligible through self-knowledge), while France cares for a philosophical epistemology (centred on the subject and its status). After structuralism, one is heading for a new definition and comeback of the subject (America), and the other takes post-structuralism to its ultimate consequences, fatal to the subject (in spite of the nostalgia for a “new humanism”). Besides, we can no longer speak of a dominant discourse, in neither of the two cultural spaces, as in both cases the theoretical fields have been fragmented.

Where does the fiction of the author fit into this picture? Starting with the ‘70-ies, American postmodernism has had, as far as theory is concerned, a post-structuralist orientation. Structuralist assertions and methods are questioned and different topics are brought under debate: the irrational, the decentring, the marginal, the undermining points of a structure. The new theoretical support is largely describable as post-structuralism, and should be seen rather as a radicalization of the former current of thought, than an opposite reaction to it. What interest me the most in this shift of focus is a noticeable alteration of the imaginary of theory. From Cartesian metaphors, proper to modernity and rationalism (knowledge as light and reason), the images present in the theoretical discourse move to a different register, i.e. to a biological imaginary of the hedonist body, triggered by passion, desire, pleasure or towards an ethic imaginary that grows out of metaphors of friendship between the individual and the world, elaborating ecological images and terms (instead of “wrong” and “valid”, one rather speaks of “good” and “interesting”).

The great paradox of the import of post-structuralism in America is, for me, to be found precisely at the level of the theoretical imaginary, especially in what it concerns the authorial subject. On the one hand, the import brings notions that are dear to Foucault and Derrida, on the line of Nietzsche, refusing everything that has to do with the presence of the free subject, but on the other hand, the discourse of the Yale deconstructors, of the New Historicists and of other theoretical schools in America all favour a biological and even humanistic imaginary, where the phantasms of a free subject and an alive author hold an important place. I complete the analysis and demonstration of this paradoxical turn elsewhere, since it is too large for the purpose of this paper.

Far from being a closed icon, a cemented figure, objectified in his own work, the author can rather be imagined as a restless ghost who haunts his critic-reader in many forms.