Literary Research / Recherche littéraire, nos. 39-40, 2003

LR/RL

Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 20.39-40 (2003): 289-295

Jan Plug

University of Western Ontario

Aftereffects of Poststructuralism

Tilottama Rajan & Michael J. O'Driscoll, eds., After Poststructuralism: Writing the intellectual history of theory. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002; vii+344 pp.; ISBN: 0802047912 (hbk.); LC call no.: B842.A48; $50.00

There has perhaps been no more disputed temporal-critical marker in recent theory and criticism than the prefix — if indeed it is one — post. And rarely before has a simple hyphen evoked such passion and suspicion: the post-colonial or post-colonialism, for instance, are to be distinguished with the utmost caution and rigor from the postcolonial or postcolonialism, as we now know. The term postmodern is no less problematic, seeming to point to a historical moment on the far side of that which is already defined in terms of its novelty, as the new. To entitle a volume After Poststructuralism is therefore not only to gesture towards such historical, critical, and linguistic debates, but at the same time, somehow, paradoxically, aporetically, to situate poststructuralism in the past. If there is an after to poststructuralism, and if we are situated in poststructuralism's aftermath, that means both that this movement is, and has a place in, history, and that it continues to make history, that history we are now in and that this fine volume seeks to begin to write.

This is not to say, however, that either the editors or the contributors to After Poststructuralism see poststructuralism as a thing of the past, as passé, past over, "history" in the colloquial sense. Quite to the contrary, as the provocative opening and closing sections of Ian Balfour's essay on Hegel suggest, there is something not only limiting but thoroughly unhistorical about the "tendency to consign history irrevocably to the past" (111) and thus to think the theoretical field marked by poststructuralism as belonging to history in this reductive sense. As Balfour articulates it, and as a number of the essays in the collection perform it, "reading theory," and here reading poststructuralism and its history, "renders the text historical, even provocative, in and for the present. To say nothing of the future" (113). After Poststructuralism seeks precisely to say something about that future. Arkady Plotnitsky, turning to Deleuze and Guattari as well as Nietzsche, thus describes philosophy in terms of "concepts that are forever new," making it "always the philosophy of the future" (153). Anthony Wall similarly [end page 289] writes of the temporal-spatial movement of the body, which "will always be able to say… very much more than anyone could ever predict in advance" (213). While it is hardly the case that the papers brought together here systematically deal with the future of theory or even of poststructuralism itself (if indeed a post can have a future, especially considering that we are already writing its history), then, there is an iteration of the future, as it were, a return to the future, in them, a return to that which has not yet been made present, a repetition of what is to come. What the essays effectively convey is the extent to which poststructuralism, the engagement with poststructuralism, continues to make its texts historical, even provocative, in and for the present. To say nothing of the future. To quote Balfour once again, theory thus becomes "historical through the event of reading…. No longer tied just to one moment, it could, in theory, erupt at any moment. Nothing could be more historical" (124).

Another way to think of theory's relation to the — or its — future is to ask the question of survival. It is, in other words, to ask what has survived of and in poststructuralism and whether or to what extent poststructuralism has survived. In Peter Dews' essay, it is precisely the question of Lacan's central role in cultural studies, which, for Dews, can be attributed to Lacan's having "provided a theory of the subject which seemed able to survive deconstruction" (179). If there is a danger of reading this as positing deconstruction as something that needs to be survived, in particular by the subject, as though deconstruction were somehow merely destructive, Dews' article is admirable precisely because it does not, in fact, succumb to such characterizations, but rather, traces with great care a notion of the subject that "can be said to 'be' only in the very act of its self-alienation" (181). Pointing out how the subject figures in Žižek's influential reading of Schelling, a reading that for Dews remains "one-sided" (186) in its insistence upon an opposition between the Lacanian Real and the subject (188), Dews does much to trace an underappreciated genealogy of contemporary theory, one that traces it to Schelling as much as it does Kant or Hegel, for instance.

No small part of what is involved in the task of reading and writing poststructuralism's history is the only apparently straightforward task of (re-)situating poststructuralism in what the volume's subtitle self-consciously calls "intellectual history." Linda Bradley Salamon's essay on theory avant la lettre attempts this by describing a "dialogic relation" between some of the earliest books published, what she calls "art-texts" (short texts on the art of angling, or riding, or war, for instance), and the "late twentieth-century turn towards the discourse of material culture and its multiple meanings" (280). Writing the intellectual history of theory, then, does not mean tracing a historical trajectory of influence, but is, rather, [end page 290] thoroughly comparative. As in Arkady Plotnitsky's article on multifolds, it can entail working across not only different historical periods (from Plato to Hegel to Irigaray) but across disciplines (here, mathematics and philosophy) to write — in the strong, transitive sense — history precisely as the crossing of disciplinary and historical borders. The history of theory, that is, is much more than a context or an "intellectual history" traditionally and narrowly conceived; it entails thinking theory's relation to itself and its past, but also to other, contemporaneous or future, discourses.

If such theorizing is, at least implicitly, one of the goals of all the essays brought together in this collection, one of its great merits is also to rewrite the history of poststructuralism, to get it right, in a sense. In this way, Tilottama Rajan's essay sets out in part to reposition Sartre — often abjected in deconstruction — within the history of poststructuralism, tracing a genealogy that allows for a new understanding of the relationship of phenomenology to deconstruction, which for Rajan would include not only Derrida but such theorists as Foucault and Baudrillard. In fact, Rajan's essay shares with her full-scale development of its main arguments in her recent Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology (Stanford, 2002) a thorough-going attempt to redefine deconstruction as a term and movement larger than the poststructuralism that she sees as foregoing the consideration of consciousness that deconstruction inherited from phenomenology in favour of a concentration on language. Brian Wall's essay similarly presents a little-considered context for the reading of Bataille, situating him at the intersection of phenomenology and psychoanalysis: "Bataille's inner experience equals psychoanalysis minus the unconscious, with a phenomenological remainder" (247). If Rajan's work attempts to reassess how phenomenology remains in deconstruction, as an irreducible constituent that at once allows deconstruction to be thought and to think itself — as irreducible, for instance, no mere remainder from, phenomenology — then Wall's essay works through how the "excremental remainder… can escape the synthetic paradigm of the general economy" (253). Developing a "mode of thought that seeks to celebrate waste, excess and negativity," Bataille ultimately, and perhaps necessarily, has to discard phenomenology as a discourse of "knowledge as a goal" (255), in effect enacting that mode of thought by turning phenomenology into another remainder, more waste, the very excrement he celebrates. By thinking the remainder, not least as that which can never fully be reduced to the intentionality of thinking, both of these essays write a history that, even while it rights previous misprisions of the history of poststructuralism, refuses to close them off from that history, leaving them open to the possibility, perhaps the necessity, that they too participate in the excesses and remainders they describe. Rajan's contribution in particular is [end page 291] remarkable for the way it is inflected by its very object of study: it not only reads the intellectual history of deconstruction but deconstructs it. Thus, (intellectual) history emerges not simply as a process of the transmission and transformation, more or less intact, of ideas, but harbors a remainder that is never fully taken up or worked through.

What such historicizing of theory also means, then, is a constant reflection upon the status of history itself, even where this is not immediately evident. For all the essays — and not only those making up the second section of the collection, "Performativities" — necessarily perform a notion of history, intellectual and other. This is clear in Victor Li's essay, which argues that a "preposterous convolution of the pre- and the post- exists in the work of Jean Baudrillard and Jean-François Lyotard," both of whom he sees as "neo-primitivists" (88). To the extent that it points out how a certain idealization of the primitive as "a positive antithesis to the West" (91) is set in motion in Baudrillard and Lyotard, what is at stake in Li's re-reading is not only historical accuracy and intellectual rigor — a certain ethics of thinking — but also, therefore, a political engagement. Disclosing such idealizing tendencies, Li thinks a more nuanced, perhaps a more dialectical, history of the encounter between the "real" ("a real live 'primitive' can complicate matter with his behaviour, whereas the discursive proxy can't" [94-5]) and the discursive. In a sense, Anthony Wall's reading of Bakhtin might be seen as extending this argument, for it makes the case that history can no longer be understood simply as such a (discursive) concept or category, but must be seen as playing itself as a kind of performance. Thus, to the extent that "Bakhtinian times and histories must be performed by someone other than Bakhtin himself, not only because he is no longer there to do any performing, but also because performance is a two-way street" (197), Wall's essay itself emerges as that very performance: the Bakhtinian history Bakhtin can no longer perform. Theory, here, is not removed from the too easily invoked "Real," from history. Theory in fact becomes history.

This performance of theory — here poststructuralism more particularly — becoming history is traced by both Wall and Mani Haghighi in terms of the body. Or to put this more forcefully, with Haghighi, "history is a body" (229). Rather than remaining content with this, the kind of claim that invites anthropomorphism and that in other hands all too often remains in a self-satisfied theoretical underdevelopment even while it begs further theorizing, Haghighi's essay takes up the challenge of describing what, precisely, the term body means from the perspective of Foucaultian genealogy: "the body proper to the genealogical project resembles, to revive a Lacanian joke, not an homme, but an hommelette: a yolky fetal shape unburdened by the traumas of self-recognition" (234). This formu-[end page 292]lation ultimately allows for a thorough account of key terms in poststructural theory — the "body without organs" perhaps the most noteworthy among them — and of how the body inscribes itself in, and is inscribed by, history, the body of "Germany" in Nietzsche, for instance. This essay thus shares with Michael O'Driscoll's densely interwoven and provocative archiving of the archive a concern to situate poststructuralism, or better, in O'Driscoll's terms, to s/cituate it. For O'Driscoll argues that theories of the archive ("the central figure of twentieth-century literary and theoretical engagements with questions of knowledge" [285]) forget that "the archive is not only constructed by theoretical discourse, but also constructs theoretical discourse" (285). A notion of s/citation refuses to forget the materiality of the archive (the site of the archive) and the effects of power it carries in favour of a figural understanding of knowledge and archiving as citation. A more rigorously poststructural theory of the poststructural archive, then, O'Driscoll's essay refuses to cite the archive without also and at the same time siting it, recognizing at once its discursivity and its materiality, and the power and politics implied in both.

O'Driscoll's essay thus works out in the specific instance of the archive a relation that the volume returns to repeatedly, if not always as an explicit theme: the relation between language or discourse and history. Thus, it is no doubt worth noting that After Poststructuralism begins and ends, in a certain sense, with a figure and a name linked to this relation: Paul de Man. It is with a reference to de Man that Stanley Corngold opens his reconsideration of Hegel's aesthetics, de Man who, nearly imperceptibly, hovers over that essay, and de Man who is the focus of Orrin Wang's concluding essay. This might be a mere coincidence, but if so, it is the kind of contingency that de Man himself so relished, what Wang might describe in terms of a machine — the machine of language, language as a machine that produces (apparent) contingencies. Rather than giving in to facile characterizations of this conception of language and therefore of de Man's work as purely and simply erasing history or the subject in favour of — or even by — language, Wang takes the chiasmic relation of language and machine seriously, which is to say that he reads it. Wang's essay in effect debunks caricatures of de Man's reading of language, for he shows that language does indeed define us as human, even while it itself is inhuman, a machine. The ultimate question, though, is the "consequence for the intelligibility of historical thought of the machine of language," the understanding of "Marxist historicity" it allows (321). And what it allows for, in Wang's very capable hands, is a superb reading of abstract labour as an "abstraction without a referent… a copy with no origin" (328). A catachresis, "abstract labour is the machine of figure that enables the analysis of the literal in Marx" (328). Such a reading of Marx's argument [end page 293] and its figures can be reduced to an "application" — as it is too easily called — of rhetorical deconstruction, turning Marx into de Man, only at the cost of a what Wang calls the "textual awareness" of Marx's theory. It comes also at the cost, that is, of taking Marx at his word. Such a deconstruction, however, opens the possibility of coming to terms — no matter how difficult this may be, no matter how much it might upset our most deeply and dearly held beliefs about labour, value, and history — with history's non-identity, the "form in history that is not history" (328).

If Wang's essay closes After Poststructuralism by opening up the very question of the history that figures in the collection's subtitle as a kind of Leitfaden, fil conducteur, or guiding thread to the most insistent and probing analysis, then perhaps it is no coincidence after all that de Man should also be invoked in Corngold's essay, at the beginning of the volume, to reconsider the end, Hegel's famous statement about the end of art. The status of such coincidences would need to be rethought, then, not because there is anything intentional or motivated about them. Rather, that contingency is a function of the "radical break" operated by de Man in his reformulation of Hegel's aesthetics "as a type of intermittent linguistic materialism" (27). Corngold's essay follows and repeats de Man's gesture — though precisely without repeating its particular arguments — by introducing a radical break in the end of art. It does so, first, by actually going to the end of Hegel's Aesthetics, foregoing the overwhelming fascination of most Hegel criticism with his discussion of tragedy in favour of a reading of comedy, which in fact immediately proceeds the statement about the end of art. But that end is not what it seems: "it is precisely through the impossibility that a subject could return securely to itself that art precisely has not come to an end" (33). The end of art announces, then, "not the death of art but the further development in art of a subjectivity detached from essence" (33), and Corngold's essay, we might say, rightly begins this volume by inscribing it in the end.

This would be a suitable place to end. But there is one more theoretical comedy to be played out, the threat that theory itself might become a comedy, in Rodolphe Gasché's careful reading of the word theory (theoria) itself and its oft-cited, though rarely explained, relation to seeing, sight, the look, the regard, and the theatre. The question, here, is whether "theory always, and necessarily, require[s] to be staged? Must it always perform in front of spectators?" (136). Theatre's "constitutive role in the theoretical" (138) is set in motion by the hope of theoretical vision to "see itself by itself" (147). As a result of its failure to do so, "there is a history of theory, a world theatre of theory" (148), a history, however, that carries with it a certain danger, the danger, in fact, of the end of theory: [end page 294]

Thanks to theory's theatricality, this is a history that includes the possibility of a loss, or end, of theory, of its entire theatricality, that is, of its performance for a public…. But such loss can be tragic or comic. With the asymmetry of the gazes, theory is also exposed to the constant threat of becoming empty and futile. 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, ones that are not accidental either. (148)

It is no accident, either, that the closing lines of Gasché's essay should resonate with those who condemn theory as a joke, as idle speculation removed from a vague — and untheorized — notion of praxis. Now, however, this very condemnation appears as a necessary part of theory's history, as arising from the constitutive definition of theory and the history it makes possible.

Without theory, and the history it opens and allows to be written, here in the form of a collection of essays entitled After Poststructuralism, such statements would remain impossible. Like the resistance to theory that for de Man can only arise from within theory, as its resistance to itself, this is an understanding of theory as the condition of possibility for its own comedy and tragedy — and for its own critique. It is not simply that taking the position that theory is "empty and futile" is itself a theoretical position — though this is also the case — but that the position as such is opened up by theory's attempt to see itself. To have begun to write this history, as After Poststructuralism has, is a necessary and necessarily precarious task, for it always runs the risk of writing the end of theory. That end remains, always, to be thought. A "theoretical end — a theatrical end" (148), it reinscribes the theory that ostensibly has come to an end. The history of theory, in the end, is theoretical, which means at the very least that there is no end to theorizing this history or to writing the history of theory.