English 456: C20 Criticism and Theory Comments on de Man's "The Resistance to Reading" Al Drake | Cyber Cafe | Thurs. 4-6 Paul de Man's "The Resistance to Theory" is perhaps among his most read essays, along with "The Rhetoric of Temporality." De Man worked within the matrix of the Yale School of deconstruction, which included J. Hillis Miller, Geoffrey Hartman, and Harold Bloom. The term "School," however, is perhaps misleading in that one really can't reduce the theoretical positions of these four authors beyond saying that they share a common interest in Derrida's work, which in itself spans a variety of issues in philosophy and literary theory. At any rate, the purpose of this supplement is simply to explain the main thread of argument in our assigned text. Like many of our theorists, de Man points out that the advent of Saussurean structural linguistics made what we call "literary theory" feasible—it led critics away from the standard biographical, historical, and New Critical formalist path and towards a sustained investigation of the theoretical grounds for performing literary analysis. And yet, this initial point turns out to be deeply ironic, given the way in which, toward the essay's conclusion, de Man characterizes theory itself as resistance to reading. "Literariness," the starting point of the theorist's project, is not some quintessential set of stylistic markers that sets literature above the reach of ordinary prose. Rather, it consists in the foregrounding of what de Man calls the "rhetorical" dimension of language in a way that undermines a given text's goal of grammatical and logical consistency. Trying to keep these terms separate or to maintain a rigid hierarchy among them has never been easy, as de Man points out. Recall how Nietzsche treats even the most common linguistic operation—the combining of a noun (or "substantive") with a verb to assert various logical relationships. The famous example "lightning flashes" reveals the deployment of a substantive to serve as the cause of the "flashing" that has been observed. That this linguistic operation is necessary to communication does not make its truth claim (cause and effect) any more valid. De Man consistently sees the rhetorical or tropological dimension of literature—its foregrounding of figurative language—as a destabilizing force that works against the reader's and writer's tendency to construe the text as a coherent, self-contained system of meaning. A figure of speech generates a strange "logic" of its own, and in reading de Man one is reminded of Nietzsche's statement, "truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms." And what does the theory-minded critic do? It is the task of the theorist and the serious critic to pay close attention to the foregrounded rhetorical dimension of the literary text and actually to follow out rigorously the destabilizing effects of that dimension. One often finds de Man reading a literary text and demonstrating its arrival at some aporetic moment or point—a place where one cannot settle on any given set of interpretations not because there is a rich plurality of meanings, an excess of signification (after the fashion that Derrida describes as a flawed assumption made by structuralists like Claude Levi-Strauss), but rather because the interpretations themselves would all involve serious contradictions or instability. What is the task of "theory" in the most widely accepted understanding of that term? We differentiate a hypothesis from a theory by saying that while the former is an intelligent guess about some problem, a theory is more solid, more likely to yield systematic knowledge. In science, a theory is a well-rounded belief that repeated experiments should be able to prove or disprove. Theory tends toward system-building: in literature, the theorist wants to establish grounds for making universally valid statements that will elucidate not just one or two texts, but instead a very large number of them. But de Man has already written that the critic's focus is in fact the most unstable, anti-systemic dimension of language—without a doubt, the rhetorical or figurative element of language, the "literariness" of literature, is a foundation of quicksand for anyone trying to construct a stable set of meanings for the text being read. Reading, for de Man and other deconstructive critics, is supposed to be a demonstration of the impossibility of generating such foundations, or at least of the impossibility of maintaining them once they are subjected to the same kind of "reading" in which they consist. In this way, sustained "reading" for a strict de Manian not only doesn't further the aims of theory, it short-circuits the theoretical process. To state things another way, the formation of a theory from a reading is bound to short-circuit the process of reading. The minute you try to move, like a Baconian inductivist, from your text-based observations to the formulation of a more general principle, you are bound to falsify the observations into some systemic set of claims or other. You stop reading, in de Man's very rigorous sense of following out the language of a text to its aporias, its undecideable crossroads of meaning. So now we understand why de Man's penultimate definition of theory is that it is "resistance to reading." De Man is saying that the resistance of which he writes does not come from anti-theoretical academics who just aren't sharp enough to grasp all those difficult conceptual frameworks or apply them; rather, it is deeply related to the functioning of language itself and to the mind's tendency, just as Nietzsche explained, to "forget" the inability of human language to make true claims about the world. That is why de Man, adapting a thought from Nietzsche, writes that ideology is "the confusion of linguistic with natural reality." One gathers that theory, ultimately, cannot escape from this definition of ideology; after all, it "speaks the language of self-resistance," and this self-resistance indicates an inability to reject fully the "naturalization" or systematization of language.
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