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Seductive Reasoning: Pluralism As the Problematic of Contemporary Seductive Reasoning Seductive Reasoning PLURALISM AS THE PROBLEMATIC OF CONTEMPORARY LITERARY THEORY by Ellen Rooney Cornell University Press Ithaca and London Copyright © 1989 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850, or visit our website at www.cornellpress.cornell.edu. First published 1989 by Cornell University Press. First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2016. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rooney, Ellen, 1957– Seductive reasoning. Includes index. 1. Criticism—Philosophy. 2. Rhetoric. 3. Persuasion (Rhetoric) 4. Pluralism. I. Title. PN81.R66 1989 801'.95'01 88-47917 ISBN 978-0-8014-2192-1 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-5017-0721-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ FOR KHACHIG, WITH GOOD REASON The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. -AUDRE LoRDE, Sister Outsider Whomever one seeks to persuade, one acknowledges as master of the situation. -KARL MARX, The Eighteenth Brumaire CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS � ABBREVIATIONS OF FREQUENTLY CITED TEXTS Xiii INTRODUCTION 1 1 Reading Pluralism Symptomatically 17 2 Persuasion and the Production of Knowledge 64 3 The Limits of Pluralism Are Not Plural 85 4 "Not to Worry": The Therapeutic Rhetoric of StanleyFish 115 5 Not Taking Sides: Reading the Rhetoric of Persuasion 157 6 This Politics Which Is Not One 198 EPILOGUE 241 INDEX 253 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book has been a long time in the making, and I owe debts of every order to the many people who helped make it possible. To begin at the beginning, Wesleyan University's English De­ partment and its Center for the Humanities provided me with an environment both tolerant and stimulating and introduced me to the pleasures of theory. Karen Boklund first showed me the possibilities of a marxist semiotics; James Kavanagh pointed me in the direction of Althusser; Hayden White gave me the benefit of his liberating irony and read my first effort to assess Marx's suspicions about the rhetoric of persuasion; I remain grateful to each of them. I have since been most fortunate in all my readers. I particularly thank Stanley Fish, who read the manuscript in its earliest form and projected a future for it, which is the first, best gift of any reader, and Neil Hertz, who gave me the benefit of his scrupulous critical attention, shared his questions, and, on a few points, extended me the benefit of his doubts as well. Lawrence Scanlon, Andrew Gelber, Amy Barrett, and Carl Freedman all read portions of the manuscript; their comments guided my revisions. The final form of this es­ say owes a great deal to Christina Crosby, Mary Ann Doane, Karen Newman, and Naomi Schor, the members of a feminist x Acknowledgments reading group that welcomed me when I arrived at Brown Uni­ versity; they have given me intellectual and personal support, both by the sympathetic rigor of their questions and by the example of their own work. I do not expect to find better com­ rades anywhere. Neil Lazarus is a constant source of energy, ideas and encouragement, and I am thankful to him for pointing out my many blind spots. I benefitedfrom the intellectual gener­ osity of the members of the Pembroke Seminar of 1986-87, whose questions sent me back to revise again, and I am especial­ ly grateful to Elizabeth Weed, whose insights, objections, and friendship made this book easier to write. I am also indebted to the students at Brown University who attended my seminars in feminist theory and shared their insights, and whose exuberant and uncompromising struggles, both inside and outside class, are a vivid reminder that the university need never be an ivory tower. Ruth Santos, Virginia Polselli, Arnold Sanders, and Elie! Mamousette extended to me their patience and friendship and helped me to shape the material environment in which I worked. Paul Smith, Richard Ohmann, W. J. T. Mitchell, and James E. Ford provided forums for portions of this work and helpful comments along the way, as did the anonymous referee for Cornell University Press. A portion of Chapter 4 appeared in the Dalhousie Review 64 (Summer 1984), and I am grateful for permission to make use of this material. I owe a large debt to Bernhard Kendler; his care and patience as an editor were matched only by his persistent encouragement, which helped bring this book to press. Kay Scheuer's meticulous editorial ad­ vice brought home to me once again the limits of every critic as a reader of her own text. My thanks to Carole Doberstein and Lisa Giancola for their many gifts. My family-my parents, Lucy Hayes (the godmother we all need), and my brothers, Michael, John, Peter, and Paul-have been waiting for these pages to appear between hard covers for a combined total of forty-two years. The force of their humor, support, and love dwarfs that or any figure, and I am as grateful to them as I am hesitant to mention the next book. Finally, I am grateful to Khachig Tololyan. He is a relentless inspiration and a tireless critic, and Acknowledgments xi sometimes sings me that old tune about all work and no play. He has warned me away from unnecessary compromises and the temptation to please everyone, which is to say, he has re­ minded me of the seduction of pluralism, and he is one of the reasons writing is a seductive part of the life I live. It is a great pleasure to dedicate this book to him. ELLEN ROONEY Providence, Rhode Island ABBREVIATIONS OF FREQUENTLY CITED TEXTS AR Paul de Man. Allegories of Reading. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. B Wayne Booth. "'Preserving the Exemplar': or, How Not to Dig Our Own Graves." Critical Inquiry 3:3 (1977), 407-23. BI Paul de Man. Blindness and Insight. 2d ed., revised. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. CU Wayne Booth. Critical Understanding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. F Stanley Fish. Is There a Text in This Class? Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980. FM Louis Althusser. For Marx. London: New Left Books, 1977. G Suzanne Gearhart. "Philosophy before Literature: Deconstruction, Historicity, and the Work of Paul de Man." Diacritics 13:4 (1983), 63-8t. H E. D. Hirsch, Jr. The Aims of Interpretation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. K James Kavanagh. '"To the Same Defect': Toward a Critique of the Ideology of the Aesthetic." In Literature and Ideology, ed. Harry R. Garvin. East Brunswick, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 1982. KM Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels. "Against Theory." Critical Inquiry 8:4 (1982), 723-42. LP Louis Althusser. Lenin and Philosophy. London: Monthly Review Press, 1971. M Pierre Macherey. A Theory of Literary Production. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978. xiv Abbreviations NA Garry Wills. Nixon Agonistes. New York: Signet, 197i. OD Jonathan Culler. On Deconstruction . Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982. PR M. H. Abrams. "How to Do Things with Texts." Partisan Review 46:4 (1979), 566-88. PU Fredric Jameson. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 198i. R Paul de Man. "The Resistance to Theory." Yale French Studies 63 (1982), 3-20. RC Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar. Reading Capital. London: New Left Books, 1979. RW Raymond Williams. "Marxism, Structuralism and Literary Analysis." New Left Review 129 (September/October 1981). S Gayatri Spivak. In Other Words. New York: Methuen, 1987. SC Louis Althusser. Essays in Self-Criticism. London: New Left Books, 1976. Seductive Reasoning INTRODUCTION Criticism is not an "homage" to the truth of the past or to the truth of "others" -it is a construction of the intelligibility of our own time. -BARTHES, "What Is Criticism?" We must completely reorganize the idea we have of knowledge, we must abandon the mirror myths of immediate vision and reading, and conceive knowledge as a production. -ALTHUSSER, Reading Capital The subject of this book is pluralist discourse in contemporary Anglo-American literary theory. My argument challenges both the common sense definition of pluralism as an affable form of methodological eclecticism and the consensus that literary plu­ ralists are a relatively small and easily identifiable group of crit­ ics, centered at the University of Chicago and positioned as the heirs to R. S. Crane and Richard McKeon. I will argue instead that a hitherto unarticulated pluralism dominates American lit­ erary theory, penetrating even those discourses that seem anti­ thetical to it. Indeed, at present, pluralism seems endowed with an infinite capacity to recuperate the potentially anti-pluralist discourses that have appeared in literary theory. In my analysis, this hegemonic pluralism emerges as a double strategy-for reading and for writing-structured around the problem of persuasion. I shall show that the plµralist' s invita­ tion to critics and theorists of all kinds to join him in "dialogue" is a seductive gesture that constitutes every interpreter-no mat­ ter what her conscious critical affiliation-as an effect of the desire to persuade. As we shall see, pluralistic forms of discourse first 2 Introduction imagine a universal community in which every individual (read­ er) is a potential convert, vulnerable to persuasion, and then require that each critical utterance aim at the successful persua­ sion of this community in general, that is, in its entirety. This demand ensures a conversation in which every critic must ad­ dress a general or universal audience.
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