The battlegrounds of theory.

Edwards, Brian

The most important contribution made by the interdisciplinary field of theory to intellectual history may well be a questioning of the unidisciplinary model of 'history' as the sole paradigm for studying relationships between different thinkers.

Tilottama Rajan & Michael J. O'Driscoll, After Poststructuralism

The past as history always has been and always will be necessarily configured, troped, emplotted, read, mythologised and ideologised in ways to suit ourselves.

Keith Jenkin, Why History?

PRACTICE IS ALWAYS ALREADY THEORY. (1) Notwithstanding familiar views to the contrary and impatience in some fields with what is perceived to be too much attention to theory at the expense of practice, (2) it is possible to argue that theory is as old as language and culture. But as a study in its own right, assuredly interdisciplinary, and parading itself as irresistibly difficult as well as inevitable, theory's place in the curriculum as theory is very recent. And what a development it has been. Given our propensity for innovation, underscored by all of those apocalyptic murmurings and institutional imperatives, theory's battleground is packed with heroic figures, claims, counter-claims, returns, re-runs and occasional acts of vilification. As the theory wars give way to minor skirmishes, camp followers mop up around the edges and we gather our energies for the next negotiation. Following the linguistic turn and poststructuralism's unsettling of comfortable notions of origin, continuity and evolutionary progression, there is indeed, as the editors of After Poststructuralism: Writing the Intellectual History of theory concede, a special challenge in writing an intellectual history of Theory. The point is, of course, that History gives way to histories and, in the best of all possible senses, "after poststructuralism" is an inclusive not exclusive discourse, the interest and values of which will depend not so much upon reduced notions of linearity, nor indeed of newness, but upon subtleties of argument in the remaking of connections. (3) Written "from the near side of the contemporary turn to theory in the humanities" (3), these essays are characteristically well-informed, investigative and demanding; they make a valuable contribution to thinking about theory as an interdisciplinary field (of battle) whose connections, interests and applications are decidedly provocative and multifarious.

The editors arrange the contributions around four metatheoretical figures or "tropics of theory" which, they point out, are not exhaustive but heuristic: genealogies, performativities, physiologies and technologies. The boundaries are porous and, as the essays indicate, processes of contamination and combination refigure the field. Choosing Foucault's term, they emphasize the ways in which "genealogy" invites a rereading of "history" attentive to the blind spots of misrecognition and aporia and to complicated forms of interplay. "Performativity" is "a synchronic counterpart to genealogy" (5) that allows for a staging, as it were, outside chronology and influence. When it is linked to Derrida's "repetition with difference," it nevertheless holds an each-way bet by allowing the performance trope its specificity while holding, as well, to the ghosts of connection. "Physiology" is held to allow a libidinal economy of history, one with an investment of anxiety, abjection, desire or attachment in ways held to be closer than the rhetoric of mere influence. "Technologies" is deployed with respect not to the machinic but to the technologies of language, the construction of subjects and of writing--that is to say, by foregrounding the hard edge of self-conscious practice itself.

Situated in Part I Genealogies, Stanley Corngold returns to Hegel's Aesthetics through de Man's Aesthetic Ideology, focusing on the theory of comedy located towards the end of the Aesthetics. It is by "detecting the rumblings of repressed contradictions" (37), such as the problematic relationship between "substance" and "subjectivity" but also between tragedy and comedy themselves and their association respectively with the absolute and the ephemeral, that he defines the difficulties and discontinuities of "a great ironist" (37). In a reading that has echoes not only of de Man but also of Derrida, Corngold retrieves the Aesthetics for continuing reinterpretation. As he demonstrates, avoidance of either-or limitations allows that subjectivity may indeed touch upon ideas of the absolute as well as the attractions of individuality, particularity, perversity and eccentricity. Thus Hegel's view of history and his famous thesis of the "end" of art which depend so much upon meanings of "subjectivity" (and arbitrariness) may be perceived in terms not of the rejection of substance (the eternal) but, ironically, in dialectical interplay with ideas of the absolute. The deconstructive reading works against end-games. In "the Double Detour: Sartre, Heidegger, and the Genealogy of Deconstruction," Tilottama Rajan presents a close-checking and intricate analysis of developments from phenomenology to deconstruction, arguing reconsideration of the importance of Sartre against a tradition that has valued Heidegger over Sartre. With attention to Blanchot, Derrida and Zizek, and positing Sartre as "at once a modern and postmodern thinker" (55), she describes three functions of "error" or misprision in the movement from phenomenology to deconstruction. these are negation, resistance and supplementation: processes that accentuate not dismissal and replacement but the tangled knots of interplay. Noting Derrida's turn from Sartre to Husserl and Heidegger, she complicates the reading of connections by attending to Blanchot's "critical kinship" with Sartre, de Man's ambiguously resistant reading of Sartre, and Foucault's "hybridizing of phenomenology and anthropology" (76). As the essay demonstrates very well, the structures of influence are multiple and shifting. That they involve fields as well as individuals is indicated astutely in Victor Li's discussion of the function of radical alterity in Baudrillard and Lyotard, a discussion that proposes a convolution of prefixes by suggesting that these postmodern theorists may also be seen as neo-primitivists. In this genealogy, Li focuses upon Baudrillard's attention to symbolic exchange and simulacrum and Lyotard's treatment of Cashinahua narrative, arguing that in each case the primitive functions as a discursive other to the Western present. As he points out, when the ethnographic subject becomes the figure of the other, there is the danger of his becoming only a "hyperreal effect" (105), a metamorphosis that displeases postcolonialists. In the final essay in this section, Ian Balfour's "The Sublime between History and Theory: Hegel, de Man and Beyond" returns to de Man's reading of the Aesthetics to examine the link between theory and history with attention to thinking on the sublime. It is understandable, as he points out, that the poststructuralist critique of representation would be accompanied by a return to conceptions of the sublime "for it was there that Western philosophy, prior to the twentieth century, most resolutely probed the limits of representation" (112). Suggesting that de Man's de-historicising reading of the Hegelian sublime is itself historical, he argues a rethinking of the theory-history relationship. It is based in the recognition of Hegel's emphasis upon history, an emphasis explicit in the dialectic, and in de Man's revaluation of allegory in terms of the inevitable function of the other, an approach that acknowledges the interdependence of specificity and system, history and theory.

Rodolphe Gasche's studies of Derrida and de Man are widely appreciated. (4) He is a leading commentator on poststructuralist theory. Opening the Performativities section, his "Theatrum Theoreticum" presents an archaeological analysis of theory (and theatre) from Plato to modernity with particular attention to ideas of seeing and staging. Regarding light in literal and metaphoric terms, as a means of illumination and as a figure for cognition, he examines the issue of reflexivity, of theory's theatricality, to make a case for the possibilities of a history of theory. If it is the case that "the threat of being turned into a comedy of itself, and even the temptation of turning itself into a comedy by itself, are real possibilities of theory" (148), we may hope that the house lights are low and the audience attentive. When theory shows itself, and however we articulate the gaze, its modes are indeed many and alterable, its end only theoretical. Reconsidering particular topologies, Arkady Plotnitsky's "Topo-philosophies: Plato's Diagonals, Hegel's Spirals, and Irigaray's Multifolds" proposes a synchronic model with an emphasis on interaction rather than sequence. Taken together, these figures offer "multifolds" and, against restriction, an enrichment of structures and connections that include not only Derrida's dissemination and Deleuze's fold but also conceptions of play and plurality from Nietzsche to Blanchot and Lacan. Of particular interest in this wide-ranging discussion is Plotnitsky's attention to the Women of the House of thebes and, following Irigaray (and Derrida), to a supplementary economy of the feminine within the Oedipal paradigm, an economy that presents mothers, daughters and sisters as irreducible complications of the male order. It is consistent with his confusion of figures that they are "not the end but a new starting point of a philosophical and historical analysis, and of political practice" (175), a poststructuralist dissemination that acknowledges the implications of weaving and folding. In the final essay in this section, "The Eclipse of Coincidence: Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, and Zizek," Peter Dews presents another exercise in mapping intersecting genealogies, this time focused on Lacan's deconstructive theory of the subject. With attention to Merleau-Ponty and to Zizek's Lacanian reading of Schelling, he proposes a connection between Schelling and Merleau-Ponty in a revision of ideas of the subject.

In Part III Physiologies, Anthony Wall's essay "Contradictory Pieces of Time and History" focuses on Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope, the concept that appears in his early work in the 1920s and is variously reperformed for half a century. A figure for experience in time and space, it becomes the source for Bakhtin's thinking about time and history and, in Wall's analysis, linked to his thinking on the body. As Derrida has emphasized, repetitions come with difference and so it is in Bakhtin. Charting the function of inconsistency, Wall cites Baudelaire on the right to contradiction to suggest that Bakhtin is indeed a practitioner of contradiction, one whose writings resist the shackles of coherence. If he is seen as a fragmentarist, a practitioner of the "loophole," this exceeds language theory and dialogism "to be an integral element in a theory of lived time or history" (213). In this argument, Bakhtin's theory of history involves not only meta-knowledge, fragments and recurrences; in addition, it reaffirms the necessity of looking back to moving forward. The case is persuasive. It applies very well indeed to Bakhtin's notion of carnival and the carnivalesque presented in his book on Rabelais. Conceived dialogically, with an emphasis upon interactive operations and the play of differences within language and between language and social practice, "carnival" is defined as "life itself, but shaped according to a certain pattern of play" (Bakhtin 7). If it is joyous, it is also transgressive, a celebratory activity found within history while, figuratively, it simultaneously transcends time constraints. In another invocation of the body, Mani Haghighi's "The Body of History" presents a Deleuzean reading of Foucault's essay "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History" to argue that, for Foucault, history itself is a body that allows disparity, disguise, multiplicity and proliferation. It is a site, in other words, for the volatile work of history. In rereading Foucault (with reference to Nietzsche as well as Deleuze and Guattari) Haghighi resists ideas of origin for the productive confusions of incongruous histories and intersections, confusions that Foucault acknowledges in his shift from archaeological to a genealogical practice that "disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself" (Foucault 147). Thus the Body of History is seen as a Deleuzean body without organs, an interweaving of forces or expressions of the historical that resist the patterns of cohesive development. In the third essay in this section, "Written in the Sand: Bataille's Phenomenology of Transgression and the Transgression of Phenomenology," Brian Wall extends the body rhetoric by approaching Bataille's Inner Experience as a body without theoretical organs. As he emphasizes, the philosophical context that includes Freud, Sartre, Hegel and others cannot be resolved into a unified whole. It is amidst the crossings and remainders, amongst the interstices of psychoanalysis and phenomenology, that Bataille's work complicates the meanings of inner experience (and the transgressive impulse) and offers its valuation of negativity and transgression as that which must always exceed the limits of essentialising definition. Turning to the problem of value, Wall is very convincing on the issue of Bataille's sense of transgression as that which resists reincorporation (as resistance) within a general economy of experience or tradition. In these riddling moves, Bataille's "inner experience" is "not a positivity but rather a negativity that becomes a positivity through transgression, and finally it is a positivity that is itself transgressed and undone by its own transgression" (257). As Wall suggests neatly, using a figure from Borges' "The Book of Sand," the sand is always shifting, the idea of the limit always changing.

The three essays of Part IV Technologies are variously interested in questions of materiality and power. As the editors point out, the trope invites rethinking of the constructedness of theory and criticism together with the changing ideological contexts within which they operate. Linda Salamon's "Theory avant la Lettre: An Excavation in Early Modern England" begins with Descartes and binarisms and uses Bourdieu's The Logic of Practice and de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life to investigate Renaissance "art-texts" as components in a prehistory of theory. In "Derrida, Foucault, and the Archiviolithics of History," Michael J. O'Driscoll offers an effective revaluation of the archive as "a consistent but conflicted figure of otherwise disparate constructions" (284), a technology of theory that foregrounds attention to a range of material practices. His is a rehistoricising process and, following an examination of Diderot's and d'Alembert's Encyclopedie in which he argues that the archive is always historical, he (re)turns to Derrida's and Foucault's poststructuralist double-plays on an archive without origin. As he points out with reference to Derrida's Archive Fever, there is a movement towards the archive as not object or event but as s/citation which, nevertheless, also involves an examination of the archive as "the techno-prosthesis of memory" (295). Acknowledging Foucault's move from the archaeological to the genealogical as one that affords a more flexible concept of archive, but seeking an accommodation between poststructuralist critiques and socio-historical claims, he turns to German theorists Friedrich Kittler and Bernhard Siegert for examples of material theory. It is the case that their work constitutes a productive affiliation between poststructuralist thought and the materialism of so much cultural studies practice. Finally, Orrin Wang's "De Man, Marx, Rousseau, and the Machine" finds not so much an articulation between marxism and deconstruction as a complication of the problematics of the figural and the literal in each. Beginning with Jameson's critique of deconstruction (in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism) and with attention to de Man's analysis of Rousseau, he notes the absence of the machine in the former and its presence in the latter. Turning to Marx (to Capital), he examines the interplay of the literal and the figurative in which, in de Man, Marx and Rousseau, "the mechanical and the linguistic are thus caught in a metonymic relation of mutual displacement" (321). Extended with attention to Marx's theory of value, in the moves between use value and exchange value, Wang argues that abstract labour in Marx, like the figure of the machine in deconstruction, resists the reduction of marxist discourse to the literal and of deconstruction to the figural. His analysis is close-checking and effective. Again, the productive complications of interplay displace the restrictions of (in)convenient definition.

It may be said of this collection that "the usual suspects," mostly German and French, are almost all presented. And against the limitations of strict connection, the essays provide their instances of the pleasures of creative misreading. The missing figure is Saussure. My reason for urging his inclusion in the line-up is presented strongly by Derek Attridge in his essay "Language as history/history as language: Saussure and the romance of etymology" which begins as follows:

 Once upon a time, in the realm of literary theory, "history"
 stood as an unchallengeable reference-point, a solid and
 never-failing base for radical and conservative alike; now it
 has become a question difficult enough to generate a noisy
 debate with no obvious prospect of agreement or compromise.
 If it were possible to ask unproblematically: "What is
 the historical origin of this disquieting state of affairs?" one
 answer would no doubt be: Saussure's influential distinction
 in the Course in General Linguistics between diachrony and
 synchrony, between language as an entity constantly changing
 through time, and language as a system existing at a given
 moment, and, more particularly, his privileging of the latter
 over the former. (183)

But, Attridge asks, is Saussure really to blame for the alleged fall out of history? Citing a number of critics (Lentricchia, Jameson, Said, Eagleton) who charge Saussure (and structuralism) with a failure of historical consciousness, he suggests, rather, that Saussure's "achievement lay not in clarifying (as he hoped to do) but in problematising the notion of history and its relation to the present" (186). Whether we agree or not with Attridge that what Saussurean linguistics opposes is a naive view of the historicity of language, the fact that we refer so frequently to "Post-Saussurean linguistics" indicates a place for Saussure in this intellectual history of theory. Further, as Derrida argues in Of Grammatology, Saussure's text not only deconstructs itself but posits, in the play of differences, a powerful critique of logocentrism and the liberation of a more complex understanding of history. (5)

To write the intellectual history of theory "after poststructuralism" is to set about old battle-lines with a view not only to renegotiating connections but in recognition that, whatever their efficacy, they too are provisional. As the essays in this fine collection demonstrate, this is not to evacuate the discourse of meaning or of value. On the contrary, since the decapitalisation of truth-claims promotes incessant rethinking, revaluation and rearticulation in ways that will always concede and question the places of history. History itself is available for reconfiguration and hard reading: agility and mobility mark the process.

Deakin University

Works Cited

Attridge, Derek. "Language as history/history as language: Saussure and the romance of etymology." In Poststructuralism and the Question of Historytheds. Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington and Robert Young. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. 183-211.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Helene Iswolsky. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1968.

Derrida, Jacques. Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1981.

Foucault, Michel. "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History." In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Trans. D. F. Bouchard and S. Simon. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977.

Gasche, Rodolphe. The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1986.

Jenkin, Keith. Why History? Ethics and Postmodernity. London: Routledge, 1999.

Rajan, Tilottama and Michael J. O'Driscoll, eds. After Poststructuralism: Writing the Intellectual History of Theory. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002.

Warren, Catherine A. and Mary Douglas Vavrus, eds. American Cultural Studies. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 2002.

(1) Tilottama Rajan and Michael J. O'Driscoll, eds. After Poststructuralism: Writing the Intellectual History of theory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. pp. 344. $50. As the editors point out, the essays draw on a range of disciplines in ways that question "history." Resisting the limitations of chronological order for more flexible modes of interdisciplinary exchange, they offer many re-investigations of the processes of connection.

(2) This is sharply evident, for example, in the contributions to American Cultural Studies, eds. Catherine A. Warren and Mary Douglas Vavrus.

(3) Poststructuralism and the Question of History, edited by Derek Attridge, Geoff Bennington and Robert Young, offers a wealth of ideas about poststructuralism's relationships with history.

(4) Published in 1986, Gasche's The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection remains a seminal work in Derrida studies.

(5) As Derrida writes later regarding the elements of language and the play of differences: "This linkage, this weaving, is the text, which is produced only through the transformation of another text. Nothing, either in the elements or in the system, is anywhere simply present or absent. There are only, everywhere, differences and traces of traces" (Positions 26).

BRIAN EDWARDS lectures in literature and writing at Deakin University in Australia. Editor of the literary journal Mattoid, he writes poetry, fiction and criticism and his work appears in many books and journals. His critical study theories of Play and Postmodern Fiction is published by Garland (New York & London, 1998) and his recent collection of poetry All in Time (2003) is published by Papyrus in Australia. He is currently working on new collections of poetry and short fiction and a study of recent fiction's uses of history.