The Current Conjuncture in Theory

Author(s): Michael Sprinker

Source: College English, Vol. 51, No. 8 (Dec., 1989), pp. 825-831
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
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 Michael Sprinker

Essay
The Current Conjuncture in Theory

At the risk of vulgar over-simplification, one could characterize the current

scene in literary study in the United States as divided along a single axis into
two competingparadigms,designatedby the terms humanist/historicistand anti-
humanist/anti-historicist.The former continues to endorse the traditionalview
that literary texts are products of human imagination, that they are in some
sense exogenous to other forms of humanactivity (politics, for example, or ide-
ology), and that the special significanceof literature(or indeed any work of art)
is its unified, harmonious,totalizablediscursive practice, in which the parts and
the whole reflect each other without contradiction.The latter, as the designation
"anti" denotes, more or less systematicallynegates each of these claims, con-
ceiving of literarytexts as manifestationsof the collective beliefs and practices
of social groups, as therefore implicatednecessarily in the social conditions of
their production and reception, and as consequently ex hypothesi incapable of
masteringthe conflictingand contradictorymaterialsfrom which they have been
constructed.
A potential complicationof this schema would address the seemingly anoma-
lous position of the so-called new historicists, who explicitly claim allegiance
with anti-humanismbut, as the monikerimplies, continue to endorse historicist
principles for interpretationand explanationof literarytexts. This is surely not
the place to give a detailed genealogy of the term "historicism,"nor to rendera
full accounting of the diverse methodological protocols governing the inter-
pretative practices of those who espouse new historicism. Suffice it to say that
the concept of historicisminvoked here generally conforms to the object of Al-
thusser's critiquein Reading Capital(see Althusserand Etienne Balibar,PartII,
chapters 4 and 5). New historicismis not a historicismat all, on this construal,
since it rejects in principle(whetherit adheres strictlyto this programin practice
is a nice question) the totalizing and teleological imperatives of the standard
Hegelian model of historicalscience. Its flirtationwith a certainRankeanunder-
Michael Sprinker is a professor of English and comparative literature at the State University of New
York at Stony Brook, where he teaches modern literature and theory. His most recent book is Imaginary
Relations, Aesthetics and Ideology in the Theory of Historical Materialism (London: Verso, 1987). He is
currently writing a book on Proust's Recherche and the class struggles in the Third French Republic.

College English, Volume 51, Number8, December 1989

825

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826 College English

standingof historicity(wie es eigentlichgewesen) is not unrelatedto its steadfast

rejectionof theory tout court. On this latter point, new historicismwould be vul-
nerableto the criticismslevelled at deconstructionbelow.
One way of understandingthe humanist/anti-humanist debate in contempo-
rary literary study is in political terms-this has in fact been the prevalentway
of doing so. On this account, the humanistsare conservativeand of the right;the
anti-humanistsare radicaland of the left. There is some justice in these charac-
terizations, since by any measure WilliamBennett, E. D. Hirsch, and the young
Hilton Kramer clones around The New Criterion would fall in the humanist
camp, while Edward Said, Fredric Jameson, and the congeries of figures in-
volved in journals like Representations, boundary 2, diacritics, and Social Text
would seem to populatethe latter. One can imagine,however, a differentway of
conceiving this split that will prove to have political implications within the
academy (its more global political effects-what most of those who conceive the
split as political have in mind-are less clear-cut), but which is not in the first
instance a political demarcation.The position advancedhere is that the real divi-
sion between humanists and anti-humanists is theoretical and that the anti-
humanist position has two principalavatars on the contemporaryscene: Marx-
ism and deconstruction. Be it observed at the outset that not everyone who
claims affiliationwith either of these two camps maintainsstrict fidelity with the
theoreticalprogramsthey denominate.There remain,a quarterof a centuryafter
Althusser's attempt to bury them, plenty of humanistMarxistsalive and kicking
(and mostly kicking Althusser, who has been officially declared "a dead dog" in
France, and to a large extent in Britainas well); similarly,the numberof aesthet-
icizing deconstructorsis so vast that one is tempted to take without any irony
Derrida'soft-repeatedquip that no one ever said deconstructionwas possible.
Bearing in mind the preliminarysketch of the characteristicfeatures of hu-
manism given above, let me now fill in the details, and also indicate why it
should be linked with historicism.Duringthe first decades of this century, when
literaturedepartmentswere in their infancy in the United States, a debate raged
between a group of self-styled professionals aligned primarilywith philological
scholarship and the German model of Geisteswissenschaften, and a group of
self-proclaimedhumanists who insisted on the non-scientific characterof liter-
ature and literary study, defendingits ethical and culturalvalue along the lines
famously propoundedby Matthew Arnold (see Graff). In some ways, the con-
temporarystruggles in literarycriticism replay this scenario, but in at least one
way they do not. However widely the humanistsof that era diverged from the
philologists in terms of method, both shared a fundamentalconviction about the
natureof the object itself, i.e., literarytexts. Neither side doubtedthat literature
consisted of works of verbal art, nor that one's first impulsein readingand inter-
preting them should be to resolve the ambiguities or apparent contradictions in
meaning which the texts manifested on first inspection. Any lingering doubts in
this matter can be quickly dispelled by comparing the work of textual scholars
on Shakespeare with, say, A. C. Bradley's or T. S. Eliot's interpretations of the
plays.

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 Current Conjuncture 827

What is distinctive about the current opposition between humanists and their
Others is that the latter, to the degree that they remain faithful to the itinerary of
their own program, have given up on the notion of an aesthetic harmonizing of
textual contradictions. The basic move in deconstruction is by now so familiar
that it hardly bears repeating-but of course I shall do so anyway. Accepting the
general validity of canonical readings of a text, i.e., granting that what everyone
has always recognized to be there is in fact there, deconstruction then proceeds
to uncover another, competing line of interpretation, one that does not merely
co-exist with the conventional reading, but contradicts and cancels it out. As
Paul de Man somewhat hyperbolically put it apropos of the final line of Yeats'
"Among School Children": "The two readings have to engage each other in di-
rect confrontation, for the one reading is precisely the error denounced by the
other and has to be undone by it" (Allegories of Reading 12).
A similar modus operandi obtains for Marxism, though its causal mechanism
is, in the first instance, construed rather differently. While for deconstruction
the reason literary texts exhibit structural contradiction has to do with the nature
of language, for Marxism (though what deconstruction claims about language
may be the case), language itself is a second-order phenomenon, subsumed
under the more general category of ideology. Deconstruction and Marxism con-
cur in their belief that texts are the products of conflicting discursive practices
which continue to exert force in ways authors are incapable of mastering or con-
trolling. This is just the point humanists most vehemently deny. In their view,
texts express intentions, and these latter are individually authored and thus sus-
ceptible of conscious control. Perhaps the most famous statement of this posi-
tion is given in E. D. Hirsch's Validity in Interpretation, but it pervades the dis-
course of literary criticism from the New Critics and the Chicago School to
M. H. Abrams and Murray Krieger. It can even be found to live a kind of spec-
tral afterlife in the writings of Stanley Fish and is not wholly alien to the acolytes
of Mikhail Bakhtin.
At stake in the debate between humanism and anti-humanism, then, is not
only the status of literature as such, but a whole complex of issues with ethical
and political implications concerning the nature of the self and what it means to
be human. The theoretical stakes in contemporary literary criticism are therefore
quite high-even if the immediate consequences of its practice remain, perhaps
thankfully, distant enough from the more pressing forms of political life visible in
our world. If literary criticism had no consequences at all, one can be certain
that the recent cause celekbreof Paul de Man's wartime writings would hardly
have been debated so heatedly in the popular press both in the United States and
in Germany (in Britain the episode was generally confined to the pages of the
London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement, though the Guard-
ian did briefly enter the fray). But it is surely a mistake to over-value the posi-
tion of literature and criticism in American society, to claim, in effect, that cul-
tural struggles are in the vanguard of history. One discerns this tendency in
unguarded moments in de Man's mature writings (not to mention those earlier
journalistic texts about which everyone has gotten so exercised), but it crops up

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828 College English

even more among Marxists, as a certain utopian tone in Fredric Jameson, or

more recently in the otherwise quite admirablematerialisttheorizationof culture
in late capitalism proposed by John Brenkmanin his Cultureand Domination.
One suspects that these latter have more or less self-consciously reproducedthe
position of the later FrankfurtSchool, among whom the autonomy of aesthetic
practice from the debasements of contemporarysociety laid the foundationfor
critical social theory and the hypostasization of an emancipated future con-
sciousness. For Adorno, for example, the only refugefrom the vicissitudes of in-
strumentalreason lay in art-and in modernistart at that. ContemporaryMarx-
ists have generally broken with Adorno's mandarinism,discovering (following
Ernst Bloch) utopian elements in all forms of popularculture; but for the most
part they have not managedto escape the legacy of bourgeois aesthetic theory
that provides the basis for Adorno's limited horizon of hope. It is probablynot
stretchinga point to say that the vast majorityof contemporaryMarxistcultural
theory remains determinatelywithin the domain of Schiller's programfor aes-
thetic education, and that it is thereforenot as rigorouslymaterialistas it could,
or indeed should, be.
At this juncture, we may returnto the schema presented earlier, when it was
claimed that the anti-humanistcamp in contemporarycriticism could be said to
have two principaltheoretical options: Marxism and deconstruction. It should
come as no surprisethat what I have just been saying about much recent Marx-
ist criticism convicts it of nothing less than humanism. In fact, this was sug-
gested earlier, but it remainsto make the point more definitely,by appealingto a
different, and more authenticallymaterialist,traditionwithin Marxism.We refer
here to the so-called "structuralMarxism"elaboratedin the works of Louis Al-
thusser and his students (althoughthey have always maintained,correctly, that
the charterfor their programcomes directly from the texts of Marx). Among Al-
thusser's most infamous pronouncements was his assertion that Marxism, far
from being primarilyan ideology of liberation,is in the first instance a "theoreti-
cal anti-humanism." Marx's real achievement, Althusser averred, was not to
found a philosophy of praxis, even less to propose an anthropologicalconcep-
tion of human labor-although Althusser grants, as he could hardly fail to do,
that these elements are part of Marx's texts, particularlyevident in those written
prior to the first volume of Capital. Marx's signal distinction was, rather, to
have understood that human beings are not self-motivated,voluntaryhistorical
actors, but are what Althussercalls "bearersof structures."
What consequences can we drawfrom Althusser's innovationsin Marxistthe-
ory for literary criticism? I won't repeat here arguments presented elsewhere
against the standard critiques of Althusserian aesthetics which charge it with
simply and unproblematicallyreproducingthe idealismof bourgeoisconceptions
of art (see Sprinker, ch. 10). This claim is unwarrantable on the evidence and
need not detain us. What needs to be stressed here is that as theories of the
structuring of literary (and other) discourse, there is little to choose between the
axial assumptions guiding deconstruction and the lineaments of Althusserian lit-
erary criticism as we have it to date. Both insist, and once again this is what sep-
arates them categorically from all forms of humanism, on a concept of the text

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 Current Conjuncture 829

as a conflicted, contradictorydiscursive or ideological space. They furthermain-

tain that the contradictions which inhabit the text are, in the strongest sense,
quite beyond the control of the text's author. A famous passage from Derrida
aptly illustrates my claim that in its programmatic commitment to the anti-
humanistproblematic,deconstructionis broadly commensurablewith historical
materialism:
the writerwritesin a languageandin a logicwhosepropersystem,laws, andlife
his discourseby definitioncannotdominateabsolutely.He uses themonly by let-
tinghimself,aftera fashionandup to a point,be governedby the system..Andthe
readingmustalwaysaimat a certainrelationship,unperceivedby the writer,be-
tweenwhathe commandsandwhathe does not commandof the patternsof the
languagethathe uses. (OfGrammatology 158)
The term "broadly" in my last sentence characterizingthe compatibilitybe-
tween deconstructionand a certainMarxismwas chosen advisedly. For there re-
mains a significant area of disagreementbetween Althusseriantheory and de-
construction, and it involves the sticky matter of the relationshipof science to
ideology. Derrida once remarked on the peculiarity of his procedure in de-
constructingthe traditionof Western metaphysics: "I was wonderingmyself if I
know where I am going . . . I am trying, precisely, to put myself at a point so
that I do not know any longer where I am going" ("Discussion" 267). This
otherwise attractivelyhumble confession can be taken as the markof the meth-
odological limits of deconstruction.For it testifies precisely to Derrida'sunwill-
ingness to demarcatethe position from which he himself speaks. One can identi-
fy a similar reticence or prudence-less charitably, it might be called an
evasion-in the mature works of Paul de Man. We could thus readily apply all
that Derrida says in the passage cited previously, the immediate context of
which is the corpus of Rousseau, directly to his own writing,but then we should
be compelled to ask him how it is that he attained the level of lucidity he man-
ifests in relation to Rousseau's texts, when all before him, includingRousseau
himself, remainedmystified about and blind to their real structuresand effects.
Not to put too fine a point on it, if everyone else has been so dumbabout Rous-
seau, how did Derridaget to be so smart?
When pressed, Derrida has, on my reading, no satisfactory answer for this
question; he can at best appeal to a strainof empiricistargumentthat is certainly
not absent from the passage cited from the Grammatology.One must insist here,
however, that whatever else can be said about Althusser, it would be impossible
to convict him of any residue of empiricist epistemology. Moreover, and more
directly relevant to the present argument, while Derrida is systematically
blocked on the issue of where his (or any) knowledgecomes from, Althusserhas
no difficultyin accountingfor the possibility of his own statementsas well as the
grounds for their superiority to competing ones. For Althusser has what de-
construction manifestly lacks: a firm distinction between scientific (or theoreti-
cal) discourse and ideological discourse.
I cannot here go into the complex justification Althusser offers for maintain-
ing this axial distinction between ideology and science, but Althusser's discus-
sion can be smoothly translated into the terms of the realism/conventionalism

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830 College English

debate in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy of science. Those who hold

one or another variant of the conventionalist view (Kuhn, Toulmin, Rorty,
Feyerabend-but all are descended ultimately from the later Wittgenstein) are
faced with the rather disquieting consequence that either scientific theories can-
not speak to each other at all, in which case rational argument and debate are
simply pointless, or they involve the creation ex nihilo of an entirely new and es-
sentially exhaustive set of theoretical objects.
Roy Bhaskar has put the case against these consequences of conventionalism
most succinctly, and I simply cite him here:
Such theories posit either "incommensurability"or "Kuhn-loss." Now it is pre-
cisely a condition of the intelligibility of incommensurability (non-inter-trans-
latabilityof the terms of the rival theories) that there exists a field of real objects
with respect to which the rival theories are incommensurable.(As I have remarked
elsewhere no-one bothers to say that the rules of cricket and football are incom-
mensurable.)In "Kuhn-loss," on the other hand, if it is total, there are no objects
in common. .... But now no sense can be given to the concept "scientific change
(and criticism)." For total Kuhn-lossinvolves neithertransformationnor discursive
intelligence, but an archetypal, intuitive understandingconstructingits world in a
single synthetic act-a possibility from which it is significantthat even Feyerabend
has balked [thoughStanley Fish has not]. (A Realist Theoryof Science 258)

Conventionalist accounts of the history and philosophy of science are in-

coherent, just as the refusal to demarcate a scientific practice from its ideologi-
cal problematic(s) gives up on the possibility of discriminating between better
and worse explanations. The latter is a (sometimes) more sophisticated variant
of the frequent student riposte to criticism: "Well, that's just your opinion, and
it's different from mine." Even the most permissive pedagogues tend to find
means (characteristically rationalist ones) to avoid this bind. As the Buffalo
Springfield once remarked: "Nobody's right if everybody's wrong."
That said, I should quickly add that the potential somebodies who are to be in
the right or in the wrong are not individuals or subjects in either the conven-
tional or the Althusserian sense of the latter term. For Althusser claims that the
distinction between scientific and ideological discourse is that the former is pre-
cisely "subjectless." To be entirely rigorous, then, one's claims for Althusserian
theory have to be separated from the historical person Louis Althusser, who has
spoken and written a fair measure of non-scientific statements-indeed, if we are
to believe his later works, virtually all of his writings fail the test of scientificity
they demand of theoretical discourse. His writings are, with some exceptions,
not science in the strict sense, but that quite other discursive practice that re-
mains more closely aligned with politics and ideology than science can ever be if
it is to produce knowledge of the world. Althusser's writings are, by his own ad-
mission, not science but philosophy. This is not to say that they have no rela-
tionship to science, either as, to borrow images from Bhaskar, its humble Lock-
ean underlaborer or its Bachelardian-Leninist partisan (Scientific Realism and
Human Emancipation 19).
Let us return in conclusion to the matter of literary criticism, which seems to
have been left far behind in our epistemological reverie over the splendors of Al-
thusserian theory. Literary criticism as a discipline that produces knowledge of

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 Current Conjuncture 831

its object (literary texts) is only possible on the condition of possessing a

rigorousconcept of that object, which is to say of the object's ultimatecausality.
The currently popular slogan that locates literaturein languageis not so much
wrong-who could deny that literary texts are made of language?-as insuffi-
ciently specified. For it is by no means clear in the writings of many who es-
pouse this view just what language is, and a fortiori, where it comes from. I
won't, of course, be any more adequate to this task here, but I will end with a
hypothesis that can be tested in the empiricalstudy of texts.
My hypothesis, which is derived from the basic principlesof historicalmate-
rialism, is that languagein its semantic dimensions is a system for representing
or realizing ideology. If such is the case, then literary texts are in the first in-
stance productionsof ideology, and therefore, the study of literatureis first and
foremost an inquiry into the mechanisms of ideological productionin different
historical societies. One can take a certain pleasure and comfort from the fact
that this is a conclusion Paul de Man himself had come to near the end of his life
and that no less canonized a presence on the contemporarycritical scene than
MikhailBakhtinhad already claimed as much in 1929(see Bakhtinand de Man,
The Aesthetic Ideology). The present terrain in literary study can be most
usefully mapped, not accordingto the political coordinatesof left and right, but
in terms of the theoreticaldistinctionbetween science and ideology. And let me
add, finally, that while it is possible to imitate Moliere's insouciantM. Jourdain
and practice science all one's life without knowing it, surely it is preferablein
any rational inquiry (as in a journey between two points) to know in general
where one is going and how one mightget there.

Works Cited
Althusser, Louis, and Etienne Balibar.Reading Capital. Trans. Ben Brewster.
London: New Left Books, 1970.
Bakhtin, Mikhail, and P. N. Medvedev. The Formal Method in Literary Schol-
arship. Trans. AlbertJ. Wehrle.Baltimoreand London:JohnsHopkinsUP,
1978.
Bhaskar, Roy. A Realist Theory of Science. Sussex: Harvester, 1978.
-- . Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation. London: Verso, 1986.
de Man, Paul. The Aesthetic Ideology. Minneapolis:U of Minnesota P, [forth-
coming].
Allegories of Reading. New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1979.
•-.
Derrida, Jacques. "Discussion." The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of
Man: The Structuralist Controversy. Ed. Richard Macksey and Eugenio
Donato. Baltimore:Johns Hopkins UP, 1970.247-72.
. Of Grammatology.Trans. Gayatri ChakravortySpivak. Baltimoreand
•- London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.
Graff,Gerald.ProfessingLiterature.ChicagoandLondon:U of ChicagoP, 1987.
Sprinker,Michael. ImaginaryRelations. London: Verso, 1987.

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