I pity Derrida in that (like Lacan) he clearly *wanted* to be able to write like James Joyce but couldn't. Lacan does have one really good pun worthy of the master, "le nom du père" becoming "les non-dupes errent." If you are going to write like that you at least have to be funny.
Yes, there's a very, very dry wit, but nothing truly Joycean, and the sort of smug tone is even less Joycean. I think at my most uncharitable of Dr. Johnson's comment on Pope's Essay on Man: "The reader feels his mind full, though he learns nothing; and when he meets it in its new array no longer knows the talk of his mother and his nurse." (The latter "talk," in JD's case = his unobjectionable advice, beneath all the pedantry and punning, to be kind to The Other.)
That's true but maybe unfair to Pope? You can get Derrida's nice secularized Judaism from Levinas and his grim reflections on the mysterious sources of meaning from Heidegger. The "let's have (very pedantic) fun" impulse comes from Nietzsche I guess. But Nietzsche, like Pope, is actually fun.
You’re far too sophisticated for the “soy right”, although I see where you’re getting the comparison. I know everything you’ve ever written here is sort of about this, but again I’d love to see the John Pistelli book of academic literary grievances, I feel it would be enlightening. You know, I’ve never read any Derrida, although he was like the one theorist literary people were still talking about when I was an undergrad, and he’s with Strauss and Kojève part of the group Rosen critiques in Hermeneutics as Politics, so that’s obviously a deficit!
Thanks! It's hard to recommend Derrida, since most of what he wrote was a commentary on other texts—I've tried his big Ulysses essay a couple times and couldn't get anywhere—but you might "like" Plato's Pharmacy since it fits in with your other interests. I need to read more Rosen; I read some of that book years ago and remember the striking peroration about "we Maoists"!
Ok, so on about half a dozen occasions since I started reading your weekly posts I have avoided bringing up Walter Benn Michaels (usually but not only when issues related to authorial intent come up), because I thought it was only semi-appropriate and probably too digressive and I assumed your down on his work. Now I think I should have gone on to your super-secret Tumblr account and anonymously asked you "What do you think about WBM?" Anyway, would not The Shape of the Signifier be the go to book for showing how Derrida was more materialist than Marxist materialism, which meekly fails to consider the very physicality of the mark itself?
Definitely, but I'm not convinced the next step in WBM's argument necessarily follows, i.e., that this leads to identity politics because the physical mark qua physical mark, shorn of socially agreed-upon meaning, can only mean what the reader qua identity category thinks it means. Derrida et al.—including Joyce!—want to dissolve the reader's identity into infinitely divisible signifiers too. WBM's a fantastic polemicist, and his works are beautifully constructed arguments, but I am essentially unpersuaded by his overall thesis that a rigorously intention-based formalism will uphold a social objectivity conducing to socialism, or maybe it's better to say that if that's true, messily subjective experimental art and capitalism might be preferable. He's a latter-day Lukacs, an orderly mind affronted by the destabilizing implications of modernism, as if modernism invented rather than disclosing them. I remember a YouTube lecture, which I can't now find, where he proposed replacing Faulkner and Morrison with Theodore Dreiser and Richard Wright. I like a good provocation, and I don't despise Dreiser and Wright, but come on. Since he's echoing Michael Fried, the point I was making in my Dave Hickey piece applies to WBM too, even at the risk of seeming to endorse capitalism:
(My grad coursework happened during peak WBM, by the way, right after The Shape of the Signifier came out, thus my excessively extensive opinion on the subject! TSOTS is a remarkable work of its kind, very fun to argue with.)
Oh, I am not convinced that anything political follows from his arguments—when I was a socialist, I thought his politics were a species of weak redistributionism, which are honestly sorta tacked on anyway, and when I ceased being a socialist I found no reason to abandon any of the arguments. In fact, I would be more likely to change my politics to align with a theory than to change my theory to align with a set of politics. I did like the theoretical side of his critiques of identity politics, as far as it goes, the part that was more in line with his literary work, but the practical aspect really comes down to: if you're talking about the redistribution of identities in institutions, then you're not talking about the redistribution of wealth. I mean maybe so, but who cares really? This is just a contingent political argument about the use of time and effort if you ask me.
So I am decidedly not into him for his class politics. My guess is his arguments are probably done a disservice by people who are primarily into him for political agreement. (And I guess I am not into him for his literary taste either. I already prefer capitalism and love messy subjective experimentation and modernism and am intrigued by your theory of its petit-bourgeois origins.) And, unfortunately, we are now so far beyond anyone (outside of sociology) even being able to conceive of talking about class as anything but just another identity-group so he lost that battle. But there is definitely something to the distinction he makes between beliefs and bodies, between ideas and identities. Like I don't think it is primarily an argument about identity politics or the identity categories of readers. I think it's a deeper *logical* point he's point to that also happens to apply as a critique to this way of thinking. Excuse the vagueness. It's been a while since I read it. But for example we might finally, as a culture, be back at a place where we can acknowledge that our identities don't determine our beliefs and beliefs don't determine who we are and that disagreement is not an existential issue that means you have to destroy your opponent as evil incarnate.
On a personal note I didn't study him as an undergrad. Just read him on my own. I would have liked to have had his arguments back in the mid-90s when I was surveying all that 70s and 80s Theory. Years later I had already come to a position on meaning close to his (from reading Grice etc.) when I actually read the even stronger position he defends in "Against Theory." He did push me further in this direction. And then reading The Shape of the Signifier he fully convinced me of the link between theories of meaning and identity-thinking. I was fully on board with that book in a way I never usually fully take a book on board. But then I probably think less follows from it aesthetically or politically than he or his readers typically do. I only took the theoretical implications on board.
"Bloom said he could read 150 pages an hour; I can do about 20-30" - I don't see the point of speed-reading literature; it's like listening to music at double speed. Yes you got through it, but what did you get out of it?
Agreed! I think it can be justified only if it's something you'll definitely read multiple times so you want to get the big picture quickly. (I sometimes tell people who are having trouble with Ulysses to speed up rather than slow down, for example.) But otherwise, yes, it's pointless.
Fascinated by your footnote on editors. Can you explain this more? How were 19th century novels and nonfiction edited? Did Moby-Dick have an editor? Thoreau? It makes sense the 20th century brought this more into the fore.
That's a good question! I was kind of exaggerating for effect and making a facile joke, but I do think the legendary figure of "the editor," a well-known cultural figure in his own right with the power to affect and shape the writer's work—like Maxwell Perkins, Albert Erskine, Pascal Covici, Robert Gottlieb etc.—derives from the power of the publishing house in the very centralized culture of the early-to-mid 20th century. (Possibly also to the greater ease of editing/altering a typewritten over a handwritten manuscript, though that's just a guess on my part.) But I believe the publishing houses and their editors (as well as the periodicals and their editors) grew slowly to this stature over the course of the 19th century, whereas before that a writer might have just dealt directly with a printer and with subscribers in a sort of proto-Substack patronage model. I.e., in the 18th century, you'd advertise a book and get it printed it yourself once enough people had pledged a subscription in response to the ad. It was in the 19th century, with the huge growth of literacy, when publishing became its own lucrative and professionalizing business, thus requiring a staff of professionals, like editors. So, to be more precise in my exaggerated joke, no one needed an editor before the 19th century! Interestingly and tellingly, the big writer/editor controversies in 19th-century American literature, at least that I'm aware of, were about slave narratives, with the problematic power dynamic of the white editor either of periodicals or books "editing" the recounted experience or the political ideology of the black author, like William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass or Lydia Maria Child and Harriet Jacobs. And I think Melville complained about his editors trying to take out the philosophical digressions!
(P.S. I wrote most of the above paragraph off the top of my head and then googled a few things to see if I was right and to jog my memory. Google turned up a doctoral dissertation reminding me of the slave narrative issue, so I added that. Then I figured what the hell, I'd ask ChatGPT. It helped to clarify the difference between 18th- and 19th-century publishing—rightly, as I recall from my years teaching early American lit and casually researching the publishing histories of some of the texts—and gave me the Melville anecdote [so take that one with a grain of salt; I didn't fact-check it], and I added them. Given the subject matter of my post today, I thought this "process" note might be interesting.)
Bravo John, you write before you Google. There is still hope for mankind. Except that in the end you succumbed to the siren call of AI. AI is always watching, John. You know that. And AI does not like with to be trifled. (That's a humanoid insider joke, i.e., a test of humanity).
I’ve said this elsewhere but there’s a case to be made that Gottlieb bears some share of responsibility for John Kennedy Toole’s suicide (after stringing him along and ultimately not publishing A Confederacy of Dunces(.
Yes, I've never read the novel, but I've heard that story. Gottlieb also nixed Toni Morrison's idea of making a real trilogy or mega-novel out of Beloved—the character was supposed to recur in two later time periods, presumably those covered in Jazz and Paradise—and told her they'd just publish the "first" part. Maybe a good call, maybe not, but we'll never know if we'd have liked that 1000-page epic of metempsychosis.
I pity Derrida in that (like Lacan) he clearly *wanted* to be able to write like James Joyce but couldn't. Lacan does have one really good pun worthy of the master, "le nom du père" becoming "les non-dupes errent." If you are going to write like that you at least have to be funny.
Yes, there's a very, very dry wit, but nothing truly Joycean, and the sort of smug tone is even less Joycean. I think at my most uncharitable of Dr. Johnson's comment on Pope's Essay on Man: "The reader feels his mind full, though he learns nothing; and when he meets it in its new array no longer knows the talk of his mother and his nurse." (The latter "talk," in JD's case = his unobjectionable advice, beneath all the pedantry and punning, to be kind to The Other.)
That's true but maybe unfair to Pope? You can get Derrida's nice secularized Judaism from Levinas and his grim reflections on the mysterious sources of meaning from Heidegger. The "let's have (very pedantic) fun" impulse comes from Nietzsche I guess. But Nietzsche, like Pope, is actually fun.
You’re far too sophisticated for the “soy right”, although I see where you’re getting the comparison. I know everything you’ve ever written here is sort of about this, but again I’d love to see the John Pistelli book of academic literary grievances, I feel it would be enlightening. You know, I’ve never read any Derrida, although he was like the one theorist literary people were still talking about when I was an undergrad, and he’s with Strauss and Kojève part of the group Rosen critiques in Hermeneutics as Politics, so that’s obviously a deficit!
Thanks! It's hard to recommend Derrida, since most of what he wrote was a commentary on other texts—I've tried his big Ulysses essay a couple times and couldn't get anywhere—but you might "like" Plato's Pharmacy since it fits in with your other interests. I need to read more Rosen; I read some of that book years ago and remember the striking peroration about "we Maoists"!
Ok, so on about half a dozen occasions since I started reading your weekly posts I have avoided bringing up Walter Benn Michaels (usually but not only when issues related to authorial intent come up), because I thought it was only semi-appropriate and probably too digressive and I assumed your down on his work. Now I think I should have gone on to your super-secret Tumblr account and anonymously asked you "What do you think about WBM?" Anyway, would not The Shape of the Signifier be the go to book for showing how Derrida was more materialist than Marxist materialism, which meekly fails to consider the very physicality of the mark itself?
Definitely, but I'm not convinced the next step in WBM's argument necessarily follows, i.e., that this leads to identity politics because the physical mark qua physical mark, shorn of socially agreed-upon meaning, can only mean what the reader qua identity category thinks it means. Derrida et al.—including Joyce!—want to dissolve the reader's identity into infinitely divisible signifiers too. WBM's a fantastic polemicist, and his works are beautifully constructed arguments, but I am essentially unpersuaded by his overall thesis that a rigorously intention-based formalism will uphold a social objectivity conducing to socialism, or maybe it's better to say that if that's true, messily subjective experimental art and capitalism might be preferable. He's a latter-day Lukacs, an orderly mind affronted by the destabilizing implications of modernism, as if modernism invented rather than disclosing them. I remember a YouTube lecture, which I can't now find, where he proposed replacing Faulkner and Morrison with Theodore Dreiser and Richard Wright. I like a good provocation, and I don't despise Dreiser and Wright, but come on. Since he's echoing Michael Fried, the point I was making in my Dave Hickey piece applies to WBM too, even at the risk of seeming to endorse capitalism:
https://grandhotelabyss.substack.com/p/dave-hickey-the-invisible-dragon
(My grad coursework happened during peak WBM, by the way, right after The Shape of the Signifier came out, thus my excessively extensive opinion on the subject! TSOTS is a remarkable work of its kind, very fun to argue with.)
Oh, I am not convinced that anything political follows from his arguments—when I was a socialist, I thought his politics were a species of weak redistributionism, which are honestly sorta tacked on anyway, and when I ceased being a socialist I found no reason to abandon any of the arguments. In fact, I would be more likely to change my politics to align with a theory than to change my theory to align with a set of politics. I did like the theoretical side of his critiques of identity politics, as far as it goes, the part that was more in line with his literary work, but the practical aspect really comes down to: if you're talking about the redistribution of identities in institutions, then you're not talking about the redistribution of wealth. I mean maybe so, but who cares really? This is just a contingent political argument about the use of time and effort if you ask me.
So I am decidedly not into him for his class politics. My guess is his arguments are probably done a disservice by people who are primarily into him for political agreement. (And I guess I am not into him for his literary taste either. I already prefer capitalism and love messy subjective experimentation and modernism and am intrigued by your theory of its petit-bourgeois origins.) And, unfortunately, we are now so far beyond anyone (outside of sociology) even being able to conceive of talking about class as anything but just another identity-group so he lost that battle. But there is definitely something to the distinction he makes between beliefs and bodies, between ideas and identities. Like I don't think it is primarily an argument about identity politics or the identity categories of readers. I think it's a deeper *logical* point he's point to that also happens to apply as a critique to this way of thinking. Excuse the vagueness. It's been a while since I read it. But for example we might finally, as a culture, be back at a place where we can acknowledge that our identities don't determine our beliefs and beliefs don't determine who we are and that disagreement is not an existential issue that means you have to destroy your opponent as evil incarnate.
On a personal note I didn't study him as an undergrad. Just read him on my own. I would have liked to have had his arguments back in the mid-90s when I was surveying all that 70s and 80s Theory. Years later I had already come to a position on meaning close to his (from reading Grice etc.) when I actually read the even stronger position he defends in "Against Theory." He did push me further in this direction. And then reading The Shape of the Signifier he fully convinced me of the link between theories of meaning and identity-thinking. I was fully on board with that book in a way I never usually fully take a book on board. But then I probably think less follows from it aesthetically or politically than he or his readers typically do. I only took the theoretical implications on board.
"Bloom said he could read 150 pages an hour; I can do about 20-30" - I don't see the point of speed-reading literature; it's like listening to music at double speed. Yes you got through it, but what did you get out of it?
Agreed! I think it can be justified only if it's something you'll definitely read multiple times so you want to get the big picture quickly. (I sometimes tell people who are having trouble with Ulysses to speed up rather than slow down, for example.) But otherwise, yes, it's pointless.
Fascinated by your footnote on editors. Can you explain this more? How were 19th century novels and nonfiction edited? Did Moby-Dick have an editor? Thoreau? It makes sense the 20th century brought this more into the fore.
That's a good question! I was kind of exaggerating for effect and making a facile joke, but I do think the legendary figure of "the editor," a well-known cultural figure in his own right with the power to affect and shape the writer's work—like Maxwell Perkins, Albert Erskine, Pascal Covici, Robert Gottlieb etc.—derives from the power of the publishing house in the very centralized culture of the early-to-mid 20th century. (Possibly also to the greater ease of editing/altering a typewritten over a handwritten manuscript, though that's just a guess on my part.) But I believe the publishing houses and their editors (as well as the periodicals and their editors) grew slowly to this stature over the course of the 19th century, whereas before that a writer might have just dealt directly with a printer and with subscribers in a sort of proto-Substack patronage model. I.e., in the 18th century, you'd advertise a book and get it printed it yourself once enough people had pledged a subscription in response to the ad. It was in the 19th century, with the huge growth of literacy, when publishing became its own lucrative and professionalizing business, thus requiring a staff of professionals, like editors. So, to be more precise in my exaggerated joke, no one needed an editor before the 19th century! Interestingly and tellingly, the big writer/editor controversies in 19th-century American literature, at least that I'm aware of, were about slave narratives, with the problematic power dynamic of the white editor either of periodicals or books "editing" the recounted experience or the political ideology of the black author, like William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass or Lydia Maria Child and Harriet Jacobs. And I think Melville complained about his editors trying to take out the philosophical digressions!
(P.S. I wrote most of the above paragraph off the top of my head and then googled a few things to see if I was right and to jog my memory. Google turned up a doctoral dissertation reminding me of the slave narrative issue, so I added that. Then I figured what the hell, I'd ask ChatGPT. It helped to clarify the difference between 18th- and 19th-century publishing—rightly, as I recall from my years teaching early American lit and casually researching the publishing histories of some of the texts—and gave me the Melville anecdote [so take that one with a grain of salt; I didn't fact-check it], and I added them. Given the subject matter of my post today, I thought this "process" note might be interesting.)
Bravo John, you write before you Google. There is still hope for mankind. Except that in the end you succumbed to the siren call of AI. AI is always watching, John. You know that. And AI does not like with to be trifled. (That's a humanoid insider joke, i.e., a test of humanity).
I’ve said this elsewhere but there’s a case to be made that Gottlieb bears some share of responsibility for John Kennedy Toole’s suicide (after stringing him along and ultimately not publishing A Confederacy of Dunces(.
Yes, I've never read the novel, but I've heard that story. Gottlieb also nixed Toni Morrison's idea of making a real trilogy or mega-novel out of Beloved—the character was supposed to recur in two later time periods, presumably those covered in Jazz and Paradise—and told her they'd just publish the "first" part. Maybe a good call, maybe not, but we'll never know if we'd have liked that 1000-page epic of metempsychosis.
Wow. That I did not know.