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Transgression and the dream oftheorySuzanne GuerlacPublished online: 03 Dec 2010.

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parallax , 1998, vol. 4, no. 1, 47 ± 53

Transgression and the dream of theory

Suzanne Guerlac

`T el Q ue l est vieux’ L’ In® ni proclaimed in 1982 Ð over a decade ago. But what doesit mean for T el Q ue l to grow old? And what speci® cally does this mean for `theory’ ?My subject is the `dream of theory ’ Ð as it was dreamed on both sides of the Atlantic Ðand what it means for it to get old: always an awkward question, and perhaps evenmore so when it comes to theory .

`L’essentiel de ce livre porte sur un reà ve’ [`What is essential in this book concerns adream’], we read in the preface to the 1980 re-edition of T he o rie d’ ensem b le, `uni® erla re¯ exion et declencher aÁ partir de laÁ une subversion generalise e’ [ to unify re¯ ectionand, on this basis, to unleash a generalized subversion’]. This dream, this uni® cation,the preface continues, `venait d’une conscience aigue’ des pouvoirs possibles de lalitte rature qu’un refoulement habituel s’attache aÁ minimiser ¼ aÁ subordonner’[`comes from a sharp awareness of the possible powers of literature that a customaryrepression likes to minimise ... to subordinate’ ]. This allusion to the powers of literat-ure and a customary repression of them invoked in this retrospective framing of the`te moin d’une e poque,’ T he o rie d’ ensem b le , echoes the opening `De claration’ of T el Q ue l

(1960) which invoked Vale ry and the powers of poetry implicitly against the pressuresof engagement. `What needs to be said today’ , the declaration announced, `is thatwriting is no longer conceivable without a clear anticipation [ pre vision] of its powers... a determination to give poetry the very highest value [ la plus haute place del’esprit¼ ]’ . In the 1980 preface, the echo of the early high-modernist spirit of T el

Q ue l is then reinforced by the puzzling remark that follows:

Not literature in the service of theory (as everyone seems to havethought of T el Q ue l ) but just the opposite [mais treÁ s exactement lecontra ire]. The sciences of language, philosophy, psychoanalysishelped to bring into relief an in® nite web of ® ctions [un tissu de ® ctionsaÁ proprement parler in® ni]. Then there was Marxism: the dreamseized upon it¼ and thought that the revolution was in the processof coming back into its own [rentrer dans son vrai lit].

Literature as the `source’ of theory , then, and theory in the service of literature?After nearly two decades of progressive commitment both to theory and to politicson the part of T el Q ue l, developments punctuated by the essays gathered in thecollection T he o rie d’ ensem b le , this `treÁ s exactement le contra ire’ has an ironic ring to it.

And rightly so. In `Ecriture et Re volution’ (which also dates from 1968) we read:`You know what profoundly reactionary ideology ¼ ` literature’ ’ is the active symp-

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tom of in our society’ , we read: `this symptom refers us to the whole of bourgeoisideology ¼ For this kind of econom y (work, author, expression, etc.), T el Q ue l signi ® esa devaluation ¼ what we propose would like to be as subversive, with respect to` literature,’ ’ as Marx’ s critique was to the classical econom y.’ 1 Derrida’ s `generaltheory of writing’ we are told, provides the `refonte the orique’ necessary for theelaboration of an `envers de la litte rature’ [`other side, or inside out, of literature’].To read the preface of 1980, then, one must keep in mind the displacements whichhave already been operated on the terms `theory’ and `literature’ (or ® ction) not onlysince the De claration of 1960, but also since 1968. These are due precisely to success-ful attempts to `faire communiquer the orie et ® ction,’ a fundamental feature of therevolutionary agenda of T el Q ue l, as set forth in the 1968 manifesto `La re volutionici maintenant.’ The diæ culty of reading `non pas la litte rature au service de lathe orie, mais treÁ s exactement le contra ire’ is that the quotation marks that in thepast distinguished the `other side of literature’ from its other side Ð or, if you will, ascience of literature from ideologyÐ have been removed. For the work of the 1960sand 1970s has to a certain extent already been accomplished. The term `literature’has been displaced. In the 1980 preface, therefore, the irony of the apparentreversal Ð `non pas la litte rature au service de la the orie, mais treÁ s exactement lecontra ire’ is that a dialecticisation of the terms theory and literature has alreadyoccurred by this time and displaced both terms simultaneously. The words themselveshave been rendered radically ambivalent, thanks to the successful practice of `fairecommuniquer the orie et ® ction.’ The question of `just the opposite’ Ð or of the `otherside’ Ð requires us to ask: is it a question of literature, or of the `other side of literature’[ l’ envers de la litte rature’]? The question becomes more diæ cult when the `enversde la litte rature’ has itself become canonised or institutionalised (at least as an `avantgarde’ canon)Ð one of the accomplishments of T el Q ue l. This is what accounts forthe symptomatic ambivalence of the 1980 preface to T he o rie d’ ensem b le Ð T el Q ue l

est vieux.

In `Me moires,’ the opening text of L’ In® ni Kristeva recounts having been warmlyreceived by American universities during the 1970s. She describes the atmosphereshe encountered there as `generous, free and encouraging by its curiosity and intellec-tual na õÈ vete ’ ; `I ® nd there is nothing more stimulating for my work than these visitsacross the Atlantic,’ she adds. In the American context, `theory’ came to representa concerted attempt to remedy precisely the kind of institutionalised `naõÈ vete ’ Kristevaobserved, one that can be attributed, among other things, to the relative absencefrom the educational curriculum of what is popularly called `continental’ philosophy.If, in the context of T el Q ue l, `theory’ prided itself on its non- (or anti-) institutionalposition, in the United States `Theory’ became institutionalised immediately withinthe university. Its institutional rationale was `continental philosophy,’ and no smallpart of its authority depended upon the alluring alloy of `Science’ and avant-gardismconveyed through T el Q ue l. Thus, the na õÈ ve enthusiasm with which the Americancontext embraced French theory Ð giving it the warm reception enjoyed by Kristevaand so many other French visitors to the American Academy during these decades Ðimplied an intense desire to be cured of an entrenched `naõÈ vete ’ .’

But there was also a question of prestige. Imported from France, structuralism lever-aged the status of theory (and hence of the comparative literature departments which

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introduced theory into American universities, and of the `humanities’ in general)because of its association with the social sciences. Whereas in France, the `scienceshumaines’ presuppose a general intellectual background in philosophy which isshared by scholars of letters, in the States the social sciences operate in closer proxim -ity to the hard sciences than to the humanities, because of a common reliance uponmethods of quanti ® cation. In its passage across the Atlantic, then, structuralismunwittingly passed some of the epistemological prestige of the hard sciences onto the`soft’ disciplines of the humanities. Theory , which connoted `methodology,’ becamethe hard core of the `humanities’ in the more culturally advanced American institu-tions, during the 1970s and 1980s.

In the French context, on the other hand (as you know) structuralism was a ® rst stepin a radical transvaluation of the very notion of theory (or of `theory’ as it is construedin terms of method in the domain of the empirical sciences). Structuralism poseditself as an `epistemological critique of bourgeois thought,’ as the formula `fairecommuniquer the orie et ® ction’ would indicate, and placed itself in an adversarialrelationship both to scienti® c empiricism and to philosophical idealism, two privilegedpoints of reference for a stable distinction between fact (truth, or `theory’ ) and ® ction.Through structural analysis, theory was said to reach `realities’ such as the uncon-scious or language not available to direct experience. It gives us, in other words, `the® ctive’ , according to Foucault’ s de® nition of the ® ctive as: `la nervure verbale de cequi n’ est pas, tel qu’ il est’ [ the verbal tissue of what is not, such as it is’].2 In thissense, structuralism simultaneously perform ed a (Kantian) notion of truth as systemand, at the same time, enabled Althusser to label Kantian epistemology (and, byassociation, the enterprise of empiricism it legitimised) `ideological’ . Theory , whichemerges with structuralism and its `tissu de ® ctions’ , becomes critique, with Althusser,the intellectual operation which separates `science’ from ideology, and to this extentconstitutes a practice. On two sides of the Atlantic, then, two quite di å erent valuesattached to the word science (and, by connotation, to the term `theory’ ), one associ-ated with the prestige of positivism and the other with Marxist critique.

At the same time, within T el Q ue l, there were two di å erent notions of ideology atwork. For if `Science’ implies critique or demysti ® cation of bourgeois ideology, T el

Q ue l also inherits from Althusser a positive notion of ideologyÐ and this is where the`pouvoirs possible de la litte rature’ ( the potential powers of literature’ ) (or `l’enversde la litterature’ ) come into play. The ideological in this sense includes culturalinstitutions (or, more generally, representations in the symbolic) which mediate rela-tions between the state (or state apparatus) and individuals. In this sense the ideolo-gical Ð now to be taken in a positive sense Ð is itself construed as a `tissu de ® ctions’ .Only in this context are these ® ctions (or their `tissu’ ) said to have material existence,and real impact, to the extent that they are considered to be embodied in socialpractises and hence to be open to forces of transformation. In this broad, and funda-mentally positive, sense the ideological includes theory as a domain of the productionof knowledge through critique which is meant to separate out the `ideological’ (inthe classical or negative sense) from the true Ð that is, the revolutionary. To theextent that the `dream’ of theory seized upon Marxism (as the 1980 preface to T he o rie

d’ ensem b le put it), what it seized upon, and perhaps mastered, was a slippage betweenthese two quite di å erent registers of the ideological. One can be dismissed as the

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`mere ® ction’ of bourgeois ideology ( literature’ , as it will come to be written in T el

Q ue l within quotation marks). The other carries the positive value of cultural produc-tion, for which the model is literature Ð or, more precisely, `l’envers de la litte rature’ .It is in this theoretical context, then, that certain `possible powers of literature’ wouldengender a uni® cation (a `tissu’ Ð fabric, or weave) of re¯ ection with generalizedsubversive impact.

I should like to stress two points here. First, `Theory’ in the United States was ingeneral cut o å from the `ideological’ question. To the extent that it was perceivedas `revolutionary’ , this was associated with an aesthetic avant-gardism which hadbeen elaborated in terms of a vocabulary of `revolutionary’ Ð i.e. radically innovat-ive Ð gestures. Cultural practises of humanist representation (history writing, forexample) were willingly called into question as ideological, but T el Q ue l ’ s radicalnotion of a `nouvelle gestion du symbolique’ (`a new organisation of the symbolic’ )was never fully appreciated; the alternative to humanist `knowledge’ tended to beconstrued not as a transformation of knowledge but as a turn towards `art’ Ð historybecame `literature’ Ð but not `l’envers de la litte rature’ , it was a question of substitut-ing one humanist practise of representation for another. The subversive gesture whichwas attached to the appeal to `science’ was lost upon the American university contextwhere Marxism meant (if anything) humanist Marxism. The `philosophical na õÈ vete ’of the American intellectual culture meant that it was just discovering Hegel asstructuralism was breaking free of it; thus the American milieu was for the most partblind to the speci® c nature of the political-ideological dimension of the structuralistenterprise, and to the enterprise of theory within the context of T el Q ue l.

My second point is that all this has an impact on the way theory `gets old’ (both inthe American context, and, through a speci® c feedback loop, in France). Americanreception became crucial to the survival (or after-life) of the dream of theory .American presses are still turning out translations of French theorists, so that, forsome, theory is still `ce qui arrive’ (`what happens’ )Ð almost three decades later. Forothers , however, it is `old,’ and an ostensible de passement of `theory’ occurs as ashift to cultural studies. Although it is not the occasion to go into detail on this point,I would suggest that the phenomenon of cultural studies in the United States isimprinted with a confusion between the two notions of theory I have just alludedto, and exists as an eclectic mixture of what used to be called `theory’ and a pre-theoretical humanism. The political dimension of theory , which was not received onthe level of `epistemological critique’ , returns in the form of `identity politics’ and avague notion of `political correc tness’ . (Intellectually, cultural studies means anythingfrom `theory’ to `humanist identity politics’ institutionally, however, it occupies anautonomous space. It is institutionally inscribed.)

Why is this detour pertinent? Because in the United States cultural studies in all itsforms is laid at the door of the `masters of suspicion’ as Ricoeur called them, andidenti ® ed with French post-structuralist theory . What is more, popularly ( journal-istically) both theory and cultural studies are labelled not only `post -structuralist’but also `post-modern’ (construed in the sense of relativist, post-humanist, or post-rationalist). And yet once the label `post-modern’ becomes attached, an incompatibil-ity of theory with other discourses of the `post-modern’ (speci ® cally those of the visual

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arts) throw s into relief an aesthetic `modernism’ of T el Q ue l Ð and this, I would suggest,has a lot to do with its getting old.

Here, factors on both sides of the Atlantic come into play. In the United States,French theory was received into a modernist/formalist mentality (`new criticism’)and it was in this general atmosphere that it `grew old’ . In his 1971 study, B lindne ss

and I ns ight, Paul de Man (founder of what came to be known as the Yale School of(deconstructionist) criticism and, arguably, our most sophisticated critic) analyses thecontact between American literary criticism and structuralism, an amalgam he labels`the new new criticism’. Both refuse authorial intention and referentiality. For theformalist `new critics ’ , literary language is `entirely autonomous and without exteriorreferent’ . Advanced new criticism saw itself as a `criticism of ambiguity’ Ð `an ironicre¯ exion of the (formal) unity it had postulated’ Ð a perspective which rendered itextremely receptive to the `undecidability’ of post-structuralist critique. This literaryformalism was complemented, in the visual arts, by myths of aesthetic (and evenontolog ical) authority attributed to `modern art’ , speci® cally to `action painting’ , thevisual abstraction of the New York School and the colour ® eld painting of Rothko,by formalist art critics such as Clement Greenberg and his followers. There was thusa common ground between `new criticism,’ `modern art’ (and art criticism) and`French theory ’ : the critique of representation.

This visual modernism had an impact on Paris in the 1960s and 1970s. A numberof articles in T el Q ue l began to transpose the theory of text into visual terms whichprivileged abstraction now construed as graphic marking, and in this sense as writing(Twombly became almost `allegorical’ of this move). Marc Devade, for example,speaks of the `espacement de la surface’ [ spacing of the surface’ ] of modern paintingas a `di å e rance qui est le mouvement de la production’ ( di å e rance which is the move-ment of production’ ).

In the French context this aesthetic modernism was quite compatible with the ideolo-gical pressures of theory Ð theory as a `pratique marxiste de l’ e piste mologie’ [`Marxistepistemologial practice’], and a `nouvelle gestion du symbolique.’ As the 1960 essay`Survol/ Rapports (Blocs)/ Con¯ it’ made clear (this was the inaugural presentationof the Groupe de recherches the oriques) theory , for T el Q ue l, was considered ineconom ic terms from the beginning. Whereas Marxist political practise aimed torevolutionise the capitalist econom y of commodity exchange, `theory’ would performthe complementary gesture of `revolutionising’ thought ( la pense e’ ) or, more pre-cisely, linguistic exchange. There is a strict parallel between social revolution andrevolution `dans la pense e’ .

But in both cases, thanks to the analyses of LacanÐ it is a matter of materialistrevolution, for, as Lacan has shown, according to Sollers, language is not a superstruc-ture. With theory , it was a question of acting `directly on the nervous system ofbourgeois society, that is, its ® xed linguistic network.’ The notion of text was intendedas an apparatus of `disintegration and transformation’ aimed, if you will, at the `infra-structure’ of the `superstructure’ Ð language. With Lacan’s `theory of materialist lan-guage’ (Sollers) theory is no longer a matter of Barthesian semiotics, that is, a questionof the dynamic of the sign (as Sa/Se) in the process of signi ® cation (or the production

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of meaning). It is a question of a `passion du signi ® ant¼ ’ (`en e å et, une `passion’dans tous les sens du mot’ ) `dans laquelle toute une culture est en train de basculersur la base meme’ [ in fact a `passion’ in all the senses of the word’ , `in which awhole culture is in the process of being shaken up from its very basis’]Ð or at least,such was the dream. Writing, after Derrida and Lacan, has become `du scripturalcomme tel’ [ the scriptural as such’]. The signi ® er (as `materialist’ ) becomes opposedto the `idealist’ signi ® ed which carries semantic value (or, in other words, `ideological’in the negative sense). The movement of the signi ® er perform s the phonic or graphicmarking that is the `agencement’ [`arrangement’] of the sign.

One interpretation of post-modernism is that it emerges precisely because of tensionsbetween modernism and other forms of modern avant-gardism such as Dada andSurrealism, tensions which are glossed over too quickly if we simply identify post-structuralism with post-modernism. According to this view, post-modernism involvesa neo-avant-gardism which arises in reaction to the constraints of a canonical mod-ernism which has lost its negative force as counterd iscourse and becomes a newacademicism. It is useful to situate the activities of T el Q ue l in these terms. As wehave seen, T el Q ue l not only appealed to Vale ry against the imperative of engagementin 1960, it echoes this appeal when it privileges the `possible powers of literature’over theory in the 1980s and attaches theory to powers of uni® cation said to derivefrom literature. T el Q ue l kept modernism open by including avant-garde ® gures suchas Artaud, Bataille and the late Joyce in addition to the ® gures already privilegedby the surrealist avant-garde: Sade, Lautre amont, and Rimbaud (it is perhaps becausethe French modernist tradition is much closer to the avant-garde than the Americanone that the notion of post-modernism has not been energetically taken up in France).Nevertheless, T el Q ue l ’ s embrace of the avant-garde, and speci® cally its notion oftheory as a `passion du signi ® ant’ respected two fundamental principles of modernism:® rst, aesthetic autonomy, which was transposed into the radical autonomy of text;and second, the puri® cation of meaning associated with abstraction or formal innova-tion. To this extent post-structuralist theory represents a continuation of the highmodernist line of development that comes down to us through Vale ry. The post-structuralism of text and signi ® ance extends the puri® cation of meaning that Cailloisdiagnosed as the program of modern art, or, at least, of the Mallarme /Vale ry currentthat identi ® ed modern art with pure art. Indeed, signi ® ance Ð theorised in terms ofa radical critique of representationÐ marks the culmination of this modernist traject-ory. It proposes inde® nite deferral (di å e rance ¼ aÁ l ’ in® ni ) as the ultimate puri® cationof meaning. Both modernism and `theory’ present us with versions of the alternativebetween realism or formal innovation which tends towards the eradication ofmeaning.

Although, strictly speaking, the movement of signi ® cation as Barthes had de® ned itinvolved `l’union de ce qui signi ® e et de ce qui est signi ® e ’ [ the union of the signi ® erand the signi ® ed’], which postpones the moment of attachment to a referential mean-ing, in practice signi ® ance pertains to a movement of the signifer alone Ð the signi ® edis collapsed into the referent. Henceforth, any further discussion of signi ® eds is fore-closed within a problematic of pre-representational signi ® cation.

Today, however, we may be dealing more signi ® cantly with something like `post-representational’ signi ® cation, at least at the level of visual images. With digital

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imagery, images no longer guarantee truth (as in T el Q ue l theory ). As William Mitchellfrom the Massachusetts Institute of Technology puts it `if photography seemed tobind image to referent like superglue,’ with digital imagery `the referent has comeunstuck.’ 3

Today it is the proliferation of digital images Ð more than any play of the letter Ðwhich will transform society and carry ideological force Ð or, as Sollers wrote of thedream of theory , `become an apparatus of disintegration and transformation’ 4 Ð forbetter or for worse.

My point is that if T el Q ue l Ð and theory Ð are old it is not only because of theideological dimension of its enterprise (the `perversion’ of which Kristeva speaks in`Me moires’ ) but because of the aesthetic modernism it was imbued with (and whichvarious forms of post-modernism merely repeat). If theory is old, it is because it givesus no way to speak about these images, this new regime of digital images which hasthe most sure rami® cations for `ideology’ . Is the `law of writing’ (or any concept of`literature’ or l ’ envers de la l iterature ’ ) adequate for a discussion of this new image ® eld?At this point critics will perhaps fall back upon it to articulate the di å erences fromthe representational (or trace) dynamics of photography. But I do not think it isadequate. Although `writing’ can be worked out theoretically in terms of a binarysystem of presence and absence, in practise meaningful elaboration of the movementof writing requires signifers, in the plural, and their `phonetic, semantic and symbolicshatterings.’

If theory (or T el Q ue l ) is old, it is not just for anecdotal reasons, or for reasons ofintellectual fashion and de passement. It is old for historical reasons Рsomething weneed to begin to rethink.

NOTES

1 ± Philippe Sollers , `L’ e criture et 3 ± William J. Mitchell, T he R econ® gured E y e:

V isual T ruth in the P os t- P ho tographic E rare volution’ , in T el Q uel, T he orie d’ ensemb l e

(Paris: Seuil, 1968). (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1994), p.31.4 ± Sollers , see reference 1.2 ± Foucault, `Distance, Aspect, Origine’ , in

T he orie d’ ensemb l e (Paris: Seuil, 1980).

Suzanne Guerlac is Professor of French at Emory University. She is the author ofT he Impersonal S ub lim e: H ugo, B aude laire and Laut re am ont (Stanford), and of L iterary

P o lem ics . B atail le , S artre , V ale ry , B reton (Stanford).

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