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After Reading After Poststructuralism
*David Bockoven *
/ Linn-Benton Community College/
bockoven@efn.org
(c) 2007 David Bockoven.
All rights reserved.
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Review of:
Colin Davis, After Poststructuralism: Reading, Stories and Theory.
New York: Routledge, 2004.
1. After reading the title of Colin Davis's After Poststructuralism,
my initial reaction is to ask whether the shark hasn't been jumped
once too often on a book written in the "post-theory" genre. Since
at least the early 1990s, critical theorists have referred to the
death of Theory, which seems invariably to prompt further
theoretical reflection on what methodological norms in reading
literature academically might come next. (The hackneyed idea that
cultural studies eclipsed deconstruction as the predominant
theoretical method comes to mind.) But the freshness of
perspective Davis gives the subject recommends the book.
2. To begin with, the first two chapters helpfully detail three
academic controversies surrounding French theory--the ways its
enemies have gone "after" it, so to speak, and taken it to task.
Davis helps the inexperienced reader, or even a reader who just
needs a short refresher course, by situating the topic in a
polemical fashion. We instantly know what is at stake--namely,
whether poststructuralism offers a legitimate methodology of
reading, or whether as its attackers claim it is fashionable but
ultimately fraudulent academic discourse. Of these three
controversies, the 1965 dispute between Raymond Picard and Roland
Barthes over how to read Racine is the most interesting because of
its relative unfamiliarity. Most readers interested in theory are
probably more familiar with the Alan Sokal affair of 1996 and with
Jürgen Habermas's The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1987),
Davis's other two examples. What I find particularly fascinating
about the Picard-Barthes conflict is the way in which Picard's
indictment of Barthes and of, generally, what he called /la
nouvelle critique/ so eerily foreshadows the same complaints made
by more recent critics of theory: its jargon is mere obfuscation,
its interpretations are unverifiable, and it uses examples out of
context (16-18). What is interesting is the date of this attack,
coming as it does even before poststructuralism proper really got
going. So from its very inception, these charges have dogged it.
It's like the experience of a young person today reading a
Flannery O'Connor story written in the 1950s and coming to the
realization that perhaps the "good old days" never really were.
3. The Picard-Barthes controversy sets up a pattern of fierce
traditionalist opposition to Theory that finds a recent echo in
the Sokal affair. But if Picard spoke with the authority of a
scholarly point of view, Sokal, as a physicist, attacks from the
outside. Davis treats the Sokal affair with a humorous touch. It
turns out that Sokal's attempt to play gotcha with postmodernism
by planting a "fake" academic article in the journal Social Text
imbricates him all the deeper in the very social phenomenon he
rails against.
One sign of this postmodernism is the burgeoning controversy
around Sokal's original Social Text article and the later
Impostures intellectuelles. Rather than putting an end to the
babble of "fashionable nonsense," Sokal and Bricmont found
themselves increasingly engulfed in a media Babel, as the
meaning and significance of their work were wrested from them
. . . .But each new act of containment produces new
misunderstandings and a renewed need to assert the meaning of
the inaugural event in the controversy. The text cannot be
trusted to speak for itself, it requires supplements and
commentaries which fragment it at the very moment they
endeavor to shore up its unity. (28-29)
For Davis, the Sokal affair becomes the postmodern controversy
/par excellence/: the more Sokal struggles to assert the real
meaning of events, the deeper he is pulled into a moral quicksand.
4. The meat of the book is four chapters that take an in-depth look
at four French theorists: Jean-François Lyotard, Emmanuel Levinas,
Louis Althusser, and Julia Kristeva. One of the unexpected
qualities of the book is that it doesn't focus directly on what
are arguably the big names of poststructuralism: Derrida,
Foucault, Lacan, and Deleuze. (Davis does bring in a discussion of
Foucault and Derrida in one of his framing chapters on Habermas,
and the conclusion's meditation on the spectrality of theory seems
largely informed by Derrida.) On the one hand, this choice offers
a novel perspective on the subject, but on the other, Davis's
quirky decisions make his discussion unrepresentative of
poststructuralism as a whole. Based on the book's title, a reader
may be expecting to come to some better understanding of
"poststructuralism," but, with the exception of Kristeva, these
are not theorists one would put equally and unproblematically
under this category. If one were looking for a basic introduction
to poststructuralism, one would be better advised to consult a
book such as Catherine Belsey's Poststructuralism: A Very Short
Introduction. Given the focus on the Sokal affair and on Lyotard,
Davis risks conflating poststructuralism with postmodernism. Also,
if one is truly interested in what comes after poststructuralism,
why look back at Levinas and Althusser? Yes, these thinkers are
indispensable to a better understanding of later
writers--especially Derrida. (Davis notes the connection between
Althusser's notion of a "symptomatic" reading and Derrida's
"double science" of reading.) But if the book never follows
through on a thorough engagement with Derrida, why focus on
precursors?
5. In looking at the before of poststructuralism as well as its after
Davis focuses on the complex issue of legacy. This is one of the
book's major strengths. In the book's introduction and in the
chapter on Habermas, Davis points to Derrida's discussion of "the
constitutive ambiguity of legacies" (7) in Du droit à la
philosophie. Unlike Habermas, for whom the concept of the
unfinished project of the Enlightenment appears black and
white--either you're with Habermas's efforts to complete the early
Hegel's abandoned project of communicative reason or you're
against the Enlightenment and all the fruits of
modernity--Foucault, Derrida, and even Habermas's own Frankfurt
School progenitors Horkheimer and Adorno maintain a more
complicated relationship with the philosophical past. For Derrida,
in particular, "it is the nature of the legacy to be in dispute;
and this is as true of Kant's legacy as it is of the legacy of
poststructuralism, which we have still not settled" (7). So in
looking forward, we also need to look back, but perhaps look back
"otherwise." We can no more be "after" poststructuralism than
poststructuralist philosophers can be "after" Kant, in the sense
of being over Kant. Davis notes: "Like Foucault, Derrida does not
endorse the prospect of any abrupt liberation from Kant; rather,
he proposes to question the claims of philosophy by staying in
touch with the great texts of the past and finding within them the
moments of excess which make it possible to envisage a
transformation of the intellectual programme" (54). The goal of
Davis's book is to access the contributions of these thinkers in
helping to better understand "the grand philosophical problems of
knowledge, meaning, ethics, and identity" (6).
6. The book's central treatment of Lyotard, Levinas, Althusser, and
Kristeva is organized around four questions Kant considered to be
of fundamental importance for philosophy to grapple with: What can
I know; What ought I to do; What may I hope; What is the human
being? On the face of it, the linkages between Lyotard and
epistemology, Levinas and ethics, and Kristeva and identity make
sense. But what of the link between Althusser and hope?
If history is a process without a subject [as it is in
Althusser's structuralist Marxism], it is also a process
without aim or end; the historical dialectic is always
overdetermined, the superstructure interferes with the
infrastructure rather than being obligingly transformed by it,
there is always too much going on and too many factors to be
accounted for to ensure a smooth continuation of the process
of the past and present into a foreseeable future. (104)
If history is an aimless process, then how can one come to have
hope in any kind of better future? To answer this question, Davis
does to Althusser what Althusser had earlier done to Marx and the
entire Marxist tradition: reads the text against the grain.
7. Davis accomplishes this by focusing primarily on Althusser's
autobiography L'Avenir dure longtemps, rather than on For Marx,
Reading Capital, or "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses."
What Davis digs up between the lines of the book is Althusser's
search for a "materialism of the encounter" in which "meaning is
made through the contingency of the encounter rather than given in
advance and pre-inscribed in history" (127). This contingency
holds the door open for a kind of hope. This is an odd kind of
hope because it only arrives through contingency, hence entirely
unlooked for. To answer Kant's question "What may I hope?" in a
poststructuralist problematic, then, is to allow for an unhoped
for hope. This kind of hope doesn't fall into a conventionally
imagined narrative pattern. How can one narrate the contingent?
8. Hence, besides Kant's questions, a unifying thread of the book is
the analysis of the reactions of the respective thinkers to the
concept of "story." In La Condition postmoderne, we may remember,
Lyotard argues that when access to information proliferates at an
exponential rate, grand, legitimizing meta-narratives collapse
into a ragtag set of incompatible language games--displaying a
seeming questioning of story. But Davis surveys a wider spectrum
of attitudes toward the notion of story in French theory running
from Kristeva's enthusiastic embrace of the apparently pre-given
urge of people to tell stories to Levinas's ascetic desire to do
without examples altogether in Autrement qu'Ã(tm)tre ou au-delà de
l'essence. Kristeva's taste for and Levinas's dislike of story
hinges on the same issue. For Levinas,
The story is a site of disruption or resistance through which
the text is fractured, brought up against its own otherness to
itself. Through the example, the Other slips into the
discourse of the same and insinuates a breach within it. The
smooth surface of the text is broken, disclosing a moment of
indecision, suggesting that the argument is not yet closed,
that further revisions to the theory are still possible or
necessary, that the Other's voice may still be heard. (89)
Kristeva's interest in stories makes Levinas uncomfortable to the
point of disavowal. "The story deforms what gives it form; in
other words its form is uneasy, precarious, and at best
provisional, it never entirely accommodates the material which it
nevertheless makes intelligible" (146). This provisionality, like
that of the dynamics of transference in psychoanalysis, allows it
to elude the totalitarian attempt to control meaning.
9. Davis concludes the book with a thoughtful meditation on the
ghostly living on and spectral afterlife of theory after its
apparent demise in the 1980s. This chapter reminds me of another
book in the "post-theory" genre: Herman Rapaport's The Theory
Mess: Deconstruction in Eclipse. While Rapaport's book--a really
thorough consideration of the vicissitudes of the "life" of
deconstruction--is good, Rapaport is more Derrida-centric. Davis's
approach is good because it opens onto others' views in a more
inclusive way. Both Davis and Rapaport fight a rearguard defense
of theory, but Davis's wider focus allows for more avenues of
thought. Davis's use of the four Kantian questions and his
continuing attention to the role of story help keep the book
together, as does his approval of the fact that theorists such as
Barthes (21) and Lyotard (72-73) aren't afraid to admit their own
complicity in the issues they thematize. Those that try to
criticize theory as "Theory" with a capital "t" create a strawman
argument, in that poststructuralist philosophy has never been
about creating the ultimate frame of reference, but wanted to open
up philopsophy to other questions. It's the opponents of
theory--to varying degrees Picard, Sokal, and Habermas--who end up
trying to create a definitive "scientific" platform from which to
prosecute theory for foreclosing the Enlightenment project of
modernity. Davis reminds us that poststructuralism doesn't spell
the death of philosophy or of Western civilization; rather,
poststructuralism holds the door open to allow new questions to
enter the unfinished project of modernity.
/ English Department
Linn-Benton Community College
bockoven@efn.org /
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