Of Postmodernism: Theory, Criticism, Literature, Institution
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Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 1991 The "Logic" of Postmodernism: Theory, Criticism, Literature, Institution Jeffrey T. Nealon Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons Recommended Citation Nealon, Jeffrey T., "The "Logic" of Postmodernism: Theory, Criticism, Literature, Institution" (1991). Dissertations. 3172. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/3172 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1991 Jeffrey T. Nealon LOYOLA UNIVERSITY - CHICAGO THE "LOGIC" OF POSTMODERNISM: THEORY, CRITICISM, LITERATURE, INSTITUTION A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF ARTS AND SCIENCES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH BY JEFFREY T. NEALON CHICAGO, ILLINOIS MAY 1991 Copyright by Jeffrey Thomas Nealon, 1991 All rights reserved. i i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are too many people to be thanked for their assistance in the completion of this project. According to Turabian, "one may with propriety omit an expression of formal thanks for the routine help given by an advisor or thesis committee" (3), but the assistance offered by Paul Jay, Pamela Caughie, and Paul Davies has been anything but routine. The idea for this project first began to take shape in 1987 at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum in Perugia, Italy. I wish to thank all the participants in the Collegium, though I owe a particular debt to Rodolphe Gasche--whose work has made mine possible--and to John Sallis, who, I can say without bombast, taught me how to read. Thanks also to John Protevi, whose careful comments have substantially improved this work. Finally, thanks to Charles Bernstein for generously taking time out to discuss his work with me. Also, I wish to acknowledge the material support furnished by the Arthur J. Schmitt foundation, and the support--material and otherwise--offered by my parents. But, in the end, this project would have remained impossible without the support of Sherry Brennan, a support that resists description. Suffice it to say, she knows better than anyone that "all thoughtful people are impatient, with a restlessness made inevitable by language." i i i TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS i i i Chapter 1 • INTRODUCTION "In the interest of Professionalism": Literary Criticism, Theory, and the Institutional Question of the Postmodern The Institutional Pharmakon 2. THE DISCIPLINE OF DECONSTRUCTION 38 The Commodification of Deconstruction in America Undecidability, Structure, Institution 3. EXTERIORITY AND APPROPRIATION: FOUCAULT, DERRIDA, AND THE DISCIPLINE OF LITERARY CRITICISM 73 4. THINKING\WRITING THE POSTMODERN . 1 07 \/ Theorizing the Postmodern Representation, End, Ground, Sending 5. GRAVITY'S RAINBOW AND THINKING THE POSTMODERN OTHER . 1 69 \/Pynchon and Pluralism The Structure of the "structures favoring death": Death and Dialect~cs 6. POLITICS, POETICS, AND INSTITUTIONS: "LANGUAGE" POETRY AND LITERARY CRITICISM ..... 211 CONCLUSION: ENDS 251 WORK CITED . 255 iv ("we keep coming back and coming back to the vision of dis placement at the site of enactment, procurement, debasement, trans substanti ation, fulmination, culmination . ) --Peter Seaton CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Despite the tendency of the semiotic process to be open ended and relatively indeterminate, determination takes place all the time, has always taken place, and will always take place, over and above the efforts of individual thinkers .... The problem then becomes that of defining the conditions under which such a violent arrestation--in other words: institution--takes place. --Samuel Weber Today, how can we not speak of the University? --Jacques Derrida Given the incredible amount of critical work done on the subject, a study of "postmodernism" requires words of justification as much as it requires words of introduction. A good deal of literary critical ink has recently been spilled over each of the topics and writers I consider here: certainly Derrida, Foucault, Heidegger, and Pynchon are not new names to the discipline of literary criticism; and Sukenick, McElroy and "Language" poetry, while they may be new names to some, are likewise well commented upon. In fact, so much work has been done on these topics and authors that simply to add to the bibliography seems not only pointless, but also in some sense irresponsible-- irresponsible insofar as it surreptitiously feeds a growing institutional framework without questioning the processes of (that) institution, as well as their consequences. Hence my 2 study takes a different tack. Throughout, I will try to emphasize the role(s) of the discipline of literary criticism--and, by extension, the roles of the university- in the production and control of meaning, while simultaneously trying to recognize and account for my own status as a literary critic, as a person who teaches and studies literature within an institution. This will necessarily entail, throughout, my engagement with what Jacques Derrida has called "a double gesture," a dual engagement which attempts to think the necessary, indispensable work of the university "even while going as far as possible, theoretically and practically, in the most directly underground thinking about the abyss beneath the university" (''Principle" 17). This double gesture will, hopefully, allow me to investigate important questions about postmodern literature and literary theory, but also to investigate the problems raised by the institutionalized nature of my own work. While scholarly work of all types should attempt to take account of the functions of institutionalization, it seems especially important when discussing the literary manifestations of "postmodernism" and "theory"--the two generic categories that this work most easily fits into, and the two topics it treats most closely. First, and most obviously, there quite literally would be no categories "postmodernism" and ''theory" if it were not for a 3 disciplinary apparatus that classifies phenomena in order to study them--a process, as Michel Foucault points out, which actually creates that which a discipline wishes to study by securing its proper object, its field of study. 1 It is important to note, though, a peculiar kind of doubling of this problem with respect to the institutionalization of postmodernism and theory. A seemingly obvious problem is created by the institutional character of postmodernism and theory: both postmodern literature and theory--if one could speak of their "generic" forms and put aside for the moment the questionable nature of that opposition--tend to emphasize the "open-ended and relatively indeterminate semiotic process" that Samuel Weber points out in one of the epigraphs to this chapter; but the process(es) of institution, on the other hand, tend to emphasize the "inevitable" closure of limits, the importance of determinate or determining institutional programs of decision-making or standard-setting. In other words, while the discursive claims and manifestations of postmodernism tend to emphasize the irreducibility of meaning and the inevitability of various kinds of indeterminacy, the processes of the institution and the functioning of the apparatuses of professionalism seem, for the most part, to 1see The Archaeology of Knowledge, p. 31/44ff. Here and throughout this work, wherever a translation and ,an original are both cited, I cite the translation page number first. 4 remain undisturbed. One sees this especially (and ironically) in theoretical writing, where--to return to Weber's vocabulary--"individual thinkers'' of indeterminacy often suffer "violent arrestation" at the hands of fellow theorists, both "competing" theorists and well-meaning followers. Competing theorists are likely to "violently arrest" a text in order to reduce it to a determinate, criticizable or surpassable position, while sympathetic followers are more likely to arrest a theorist's work in transforming it into an interpretative grid, an aid to producing determinate readings. One might conclude from this paradox that the "practice" of criticism simply has not caught up with the "theory," and that what is necessary is some discussion concerning how to close the gap--to make theory more determinable in practice--or, in an anti-theory mode, a discussion of the inevitability of the gap between theory and practice.2 I defer these important and necessary discussions for the time being, to point out instead that what tends to go unexamined in such discussions is the surreptitious forwarding of a certain institutional interest in determination itself, in arresting what purports to be an 2one sees the former proposition played out in any number of theory-practice primers, from books as disparate as Eagleton's Literary Theory and Norris' Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. The latter "anti-theory" mode is found in the work of the "new pragmatists"--see Mitchell's Against Theory. 5 open-ended process in the service of "professional," institutional ends. As Paul Bove points out in Intellectuals in Power, even the most trenchant politically or theoretically oppositional criticism can serve to legitimate