[The Montana Professor 1.3, Fall 1991 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
David Lehman
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991
Kurt Mosser, Ph.D.
Columbus, Ohio
It is hardly surprising that the one approach to philosophy originating in the United States was pragmatism. Americans have always exhibited, quite proudly in fact, a down to earth stubbornness and an impatience with the rarefied niceties of metaphysics--as soon as the discussion gets too abstract, tables start getting thumped, and, taking a chapter from our British cousins, rocks start getting kicked. Nor is it difficult to understand the continued popularity of such directors as Frank Capra and Preston Sturges--we like seeing the righteous, stout-hearted little guy win, and that only happens when the intellectual pretensions and wealthy elitism of the rich and powerful are revealed as empty, meaningless, and dehumanizing.
With a keen understanding of this audience, David Lehman undertakes in Signs of the Times to expose the conceits of a prominent literary theory and its chief American representative, Paul de Man. Deconstruction is a perfect target--obscure, long-winded, possessed by inscrutable jargon--and de Man is a prefect foil--witty, urbane, frightfully smart and sophisticated. De Man's terrible secret, that between December 1940 and November 1942 he wrote some 180 articles for two Belgian newspapers with pronounced sympathies for the Nazis, gives Lehman his point of attack. In one blow, he hopes to convince us that de Man was a fraud, intellectually dishonest, and, as Lenin might put it, "objectively" anti-Semitic. But Lehman is after bigger game than this, for the fall of de Man leads to the winter of deconstruction--if not of contemporary literary theory in general--its chicanery now out in the open for all to see. To be sure, Lehman's effort is persuasive, its effectiveness strengthened by his lucid, straightforward prose. But reading a little more closely, we find some serious flaws that tend to undermine his argument, if not his conclusion. Rather than a stake through the heart of deconstruction, we have here instead a nail--and a rather slender one at that--in its coffin.
Deconstruction is a technique of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida for reading texts by calling into question most, if not all, the presuppositions of the very activity of "reading texts." Its strategy is grounded in the work of Husserl and Heidegger, with perhaps its deepest roots in Nietzsche. It is, furthermore, part of a larger theoretical approach known as "hermeneutics," introduced by Friedrich Schleirmacher as a way of interpreting the Bible. While there is no no need here to go into the complex issues of these theories and their histories, suffice it to say that deconstruction wants--to use Husserl's term--to "bracket" such notions as "the text," "the reader," "the author"; more radically, it wants to render problematic the very notion of meaning itself. This seems to raise immediately a dilemma for deconstruction's proponents: either the genuine meaning (or the possibility of meaning) of a statement can be preserved, in which case the deconstructionist is wrong, or she is right and it becomes unclear why anything she says is of any interest. Although this strikes some as veering close to the Liar's Paradox ("everything I say is a lie"), it seems more in jeopardy of yielding to F.H. Bradley's quip, that when two solipsists meet in passing, they hide their heads in shame.
Even granting that Lehman's book is aimed at a general audience, it is unfortunate that he so rarely gives any arguments to establish his critical points. Whether or not deconstruction is tenable, Lehman's claims are often left unsupported, and not infrequently a lack of philosophical sophistication reveals itself. Thus, we find this passage early on:
There is no hint of a smile when--in an example presented by the physicist James Trefil--"a philosopher of science says that the laws of physics are merely social conventions, like traffic laws." To deconstruct that position you would need only to cross the street against the flow of rushing traffic. Any volunteers? (26)
What accounts for the status of the laws of physics is, in fact, a matter of considerable dispute among philosophers of science, few of whom would count themselves as deconstructionists or see the relevance of Lehman's remark about crossing traffic. But Lehman moves on, content that this facile discussion has inflicted a telling blow. Again, in an account of Professor Laurence Tribe's use of "paradigm shifts" in characterizing the relationship between law and society, Lehman attributes such talk to the pernicious influence of deconstruction. But even from the few citations given from Tribe's article, it is abundantly clear that he is speaking in terms of the philosopher and historian of science Thomas Kuhn's extremely influential The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In brief, Kuhn argues that the radical changes brought about by revolutions in science--e.g., the shift from classical to quantum mechanics--entail that two physicists operating with different paradigms employ "incommensurable" vocabularies and are talking about two different worlds. Deconstruction is nefarious indeed--Kuhn's book was first published in 1962, well before the advent of deconstruction, and five years before Derrida's first book, La voix et la phénomène. Lehman rightly criticizes, with John Searle, Jonathan Culler's somewhat mystifying analysis of causation. Yet three pages later, Lehman appears to succumb to an elementary post hoc fallacy, implying that the decline in the numbers of literature majors has been caused by trendy literary criticism, because the latter flourished at the same time. Throughout, and as we will see again, Lehman relies on a dismayingly naive distinction between fact and theory. One last point along these lines: in his brief description of semiotics and the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, Lehman neglects to mention that both the modern use of the term "semiotics" and the approach whereby all meaning is given in signs was the much earlier contribution of the great American pragmatist C.S. Pierce.
Lehman's overall effort is marred as well by some rather more specific troubles. Thus we are told that deconstruction has penetrated even everyday life--but it is a peculiar fan (even in New York) who relies on his version of the "sports pages," The New Yorker, The New York Times, and the Village Voice. We also find numerous oversimplifications--as when Critical Legal Studies is taken as an example of applying deconstructive techniques to jurisprudence. I think it is fair to say that for those who accept the CLS reading, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, Gramsci, and especially Marx are at least as important as Derrida and de Man. Similarly, Lehman takes issue with those for whom "art is a species of production, of interest as an object of study to the extent that it presents a microcosm of the economic structure of capitalism" (112, my emphasis). This is not only a simplistic reduction of such analysis; by saying it does violence to the "moral experience of a work of art," Lehman conveniently overlooks the idea that according to this view, such moral experiences themselves need to be evaluated in light of their role within the ideological superstructure. Rightly or wrongly, such a materialist analysis offers a far richer, and much more subtle, critique than Lehman acknowledges.
What we have in Lehman's book is what might be called an "argument by false alternative." Thus we have either the real world or no world; determinate meaning or no meaning; the text or no text. But it is clear enough that one can be skeptical without being a skeptic (e.g., Socrates). As a specific example, Lehman derides any theory that is willing to "obliterate the differences between Roger Rabbit and Henry James" (80), or that treats indifferently a soup can and an ode by Keats as a "text" to be interpreted. Yet one hardly need be a deconstructionist to recognize the tremendous difficulties involved in drawing such distinctions. Lehman relies implicitly here on some standard--he makes it rather clear that we all (the tough-minded) really know that James is to be preferred--but never lets on where it comes from, how it is justified, and how we decide the trickier cases, such as Jane Austen vs. James. One suspects Matthew Arnold lurks somewhere in the background.
This leads to the more general, and most troubling, problem of Lehman's underlying assumption, his ready distinction between theory and fact. Lehman seems committed to, or perhaps better, presupposes, what might be taken as a form of "naive realism," the idea that observational claims about the world can be made, and their truth and falsity determined, unproblematically. Those who would question this kind of blithe reliance on "empirical facts" (one of Lehman's favorite terms; cf. 111, 201, 230, 243, inter alia) are apparently in league with the hermeneutics of suspicion, and on a slippery slope toward skepticism and nihilism (which Lehman frequently fails to distinguish; cf. 41, 66, 77). Hence the insidious spread of deconstruction may have successfully infiltrated even the bastions of analytic philosophy, for no one has done more than Quine, Goodman, Sellars, and Davidson to call into question Lehman's basic assumption and its alleged capacity to distinguish easily observation and theory.
In addition to these systematic and pervasive problems with Lehman's book, there are two further difficulties that weaken his case against literary theory as practiced in the United States. First, and without denying the influence deconstruction has had, Lehman badly overstates the issue by virtually identifying contemporary literary theory with deconstruction. He tends to criticize theory in general by attacking the practices of deconstruction, resulting in a straw man argument that ignores the vitality of its competitors. For example, he writes, "If our writers today operate in a critical void, surely some of the blame attaches to the academic theorists whose backs are turned to books other than their own" (63). Here a genuine difficulty for some deconstructionists--the immersion in theory and meta-criticism to the extent that literature itself is marginalized--is taken to characterize, quite inaccurately, literary theory simpliciter. Lehman does, in this case, make clear what he sees the proper role of criticism to be--the evaluation of a novel or poem's "moral dimension" and its relative "artistic success," as well as to treat "the ideas and the values it promotes" (53). Even if deconstruction fails these criteria, it is less obvious that literary theory as a whole does. And it remains unclear here, for among those theorists Lehman neglects even to mention are Paul Ricoeur, Frederick Jameson, Wolfgang Iser, Richard Poirier, Hans Robert Jauss; only a brief nod is given to Terry Eagleton, Edward Said, Wayne Booth, and the movement known as the "New Historicism"; no mention is made of Mikhail Bakhtin and the enormous amount of work he has inspired. The claim that these theorists have turned their backs on books other than their own seems to rest on the dubious premise that identifies literary theory with deconstruction.
Second, it should be noted that Lehman does an admirable job in giving an accessible account of deconstruction that is, on the whole, fair and balanced. To be sure, the approach doesn't lend itself to such treatment, enamored as it is of neologisms, puns, and orthographic novelties. (For anyone who may still doubt this, I suggest looking at Gayatri Spivak's introduction to her translation of De la grammatologie, a virtual monument to impenetrable prose.) But when Lehman turns his critical eye toward deconstruction we, again, rarely see arguments, but rather anecdote, caricature, and the occasional acerbity from David Lodge's novel Small World. Given Lehman's contention--obviously correct, I think--that Derrida and de Man are the preeminent representatives of deconstruction, it is surprising how few of their own theoretical formulations are presented. Relatively little of de Man's, and even less of Derrida's, critical writings are directly examined. Instead, deconstruction is indicted on the basis of others' writings; it is consistently the acolytes, not the priests themselves, who are scrutinized. Thus we see quoted Culler, Spivak, Stanley Fish, Barbara Johnson, Christopher Norris, Richard Rand, Houston Baker; in terms of theoretical substance, J. Hillis Miller may be cited as frequently as Derrida, if not more so. It hardly seems just to convict the leaders for what their followers claim. To see the contrast, one need only look at Alan White's "Reconstructing Husserl: A Critical Response to Derrida's Speech and Phenomena" (Husserl Studies, 1987) or J. Claude Evans's recent Strategies of Deconstruction (University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
While the first half of Lehman's book deals with the theory of deconstruction, the second half is an examination of de Man's hidden past, which came to light four years after his 1983 death, when a graduate student discovered his wartime journalism. Certain things are clear. De Man wrote 170 articles for Le Soir and ten for Het Vlaamische Land. Both newspapers, after the Nazis invaded Belgium, were run by collaborationists, openly supported the Fascists, and were anti-Semitic. De Man's articles were at the very least tinged with anti-Semitism; Lehman provides a translation of de Man's most disturbing, "The Jews in Contemporary Literature," in an appendix. He had some sordid business dealings and abandoned his Belgian family. His uncle Hendrik, with whom de Man was very close, was a brazen collaborator and prominent Nazi sympathizer. After he came to the U.S., de Man actively dissembled about his past, acknowledging it only once in a prevaricating letter to the co-director of the Harvard Society of Fellows. His behavior was disgraceful, and quite possibly inexcusable.
All of this is well-documented by Lehman, as is the shameful behavior exhibited by some of de Man's friends and fellow deconstructionists. It is, I think, best left to the reader to evaluate the evidence Lehman marshals against de Man, and to see if the rather harsh verdict he renders is appropriate and fair. Certainly de Man's case is less clear-cut than that of Heidegger, who played an active role in the Nazi government as the Rector of the university system. Heidegger's behavior, furthermore, was well-known during his lifetime, yet he never expressed the kind of regret which one would expect and hope for, even as late as what is now a notorious 1967 Der Spiegel interview. Certain other factors tend to mitigate--but not exculpate--de Man's involvement: he took a Jewish couple into his home, locked out of their Brussels apartment after curfew; he had Jewish friends in Belgium as well as many Jewish friends at Yale, none of whom ever detected even a glimpse of any anti-Semitism. Indeed, de Man seems to have been almost universally admired by his colleagues for his honesty and integrity. It should also be remembered, although Lehman discounts it, that de Man was 21 when he started to write for Le Soir; it was no doubt tempting for a young intellectual to have a job at a newspaper that, prior to the Nazi takeover, enjoyed such an eminent reputation. Finally, while his 1955 letter to the Society of Fellows is full of half-truths and outright falsehoods, he does mention Le Soir by name, making it relatively easy to locate his articles, had anyone been interested. This neither explains nor excuses his conduct. But it does make it a little easier to accept the 1945 military court's conclusion in Antwerp, which released him without charges. It seems at least as likely that de Man was correctly seen by his Belgian judges--who were, of course, intimately familiar with the evidence--as a shallow, youthful, and unimportant political opportunist.
Much more tenuous is Lehman's attempt to connect the metaphysics--or anti-metaphysics--of deconstruction with relatively specific political ideologies. (As Ronald Hayman notes in his biography of Nietzsche, Heidegger calls Nietzsche "the last metaphysician," which, in turn, is what Derrida says of Heidegger. No doubt, the same thing was said of Heraclitus and Parmenides.) This is an extremely difficult connection to make, and Lehman does little to substantiate the charge. Here again, his philosophical naïveté leads to some awkwardness, as in his reading of Richard Rorty, who is misidentified as a "professor of philosophy" (he is, officially, the "University Professor of Humanities" at the University of Virginia--a distinction that goes to the heart of Rorty's project). Lehman writes (230), "In keeping a philosopher's life and work in separate categories, however, isn't it Rorty who risks diminishing the importance of philosophy?" It seems that Lehman is unaware here that Rorty has been arguing for some 20 years that "philosophy" should not serve as some kind of independent, adjudicating meta-discipline, but should take its place as one dimension of a great conversation among and across disciplines. Rorty admires the "edifying" philosophy found in the late writings of Dewey, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein, and opposes the "systematic" model of Descartes, Locke, and Kant. He hardly endorses an approach that treats life and work as "separate categories." Lehman concludes this discussion with a claim that is either a stunning non sequitur or rests on the questionable fact-theory distinction mentioned earlier: "Einstein's moral character has no relation to his physics because physics is not moral philosophy." This seems not only to be an inference Einstein himself would reject, but to be closer in spirit to Werner von Braun's observation that scientists need only to worry about making the rockets go up, not about where they come down. In any case, Lehman's attempt to link deconstruction with skepticism and nihilism (which, again, he often and annoyingly conflates) and a loss of moral compass is awkward and forced, is again propelled by anecdote and conjecture, and is the most unsatisfying part of the book.
Lehman concludes Signs of the Times by finally making explicit the political orientation that is implicit throughout. Rather than being merely unsatisfying, this discussion relies on caricature and exaggeration to such an extent that it becomes difficult to take seriously. Again, we are confronted with a simplistic set of alternatives--deconstruction/literary theory/hermeneutics, or literary criticism as "correctly" done. This, of course, is not much of a choice, and, unsurprisingly, allows Lehman to turn his attention to the twin evils: the questioning of the "canon" and "political correctness." Evidently, if we choose to take seriously the questions raised by deconstruction--or even contemporary literary theory--we lose all ability to evaluate the relative merits of Proust and "I Love Lucy." (Once more, we don't hear from Derrida or de Man--here Culler is taken as the target.) What does constitute the canon? What should constitute the canon? Why is the tradition so dominated by "dead European white males"? What is the relation between power in a society and the literature it produces? Lehman seems to think such questions really aren't of much interest or relevance, and so can dismiss the issues raised. Thus he can write, "The right-minded assistant professor in the post-Vietnam era imposes his or her own politically correct attitudes upon the literature of the past--at the cost of eliminating the sense of the past" (262). Granting this is even logically coherent, I will leave it to the reader to decide how representative it is to the teaching of literature in today's universities. I will, however, point out that I had a professor--cited several times in Lehman's book, and no friend of deconstruction--tell our class that "no interesting political literature is being produced today in the Western hemisphere." I would hesitate to blame such patent nonsense on his deep respect for traditional literary criticism and the "canon." Lehman bemoans the fact that the deconstructionists have become, in Roger Kimball's phrase, "tenured radicals," whose influence will persist. This, of course, remains to be seen, although I detect a serious decline in its alleged domination of literary theory (and I must admit that I have yet to discover the deep radicalization of the university, for that matter). It has lasted about 25 years, about the same length of time, Lehman notes, New Criticism flourished. Certainly Lehman's account of Paul de Man's life raises deeply troubling questions, and he provides a clear introduction to deconstruction. Furthermore, there is some good gossip, and he writes an engaging prose. But the reader should be aware that Lehman has a rather dogmatic political agenda of his own, and this, and his lack of critical rigor and evenhandedness, makes Signs of the Times ultimately an unsatisfying book.
[The Montana Professor 1.3, Fall 1991 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]