Derrida and Pynchon (Chambers review)

[jbor]

Emancipatory predicaments in postmodern criticism -- Pynchon's Poetics:
Interfacing Theory and Text by Hanjo Berressem / Dissident Postmodernists:
Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon by Paul Maltby
Review by Judith Chambers. Contemporary Literature. Madison: Summer 1994.
Vol.35, Iss. 2;  pg. 376

The phenomenon of applied poststructuralist criticism is at best a slippery
concept. On the one hand, the critic invariably acknowledges an author's
exercise of deconstruction--how the author exposes the logocentricity of
some positivist or humanist premise based on the privileging of such
positions as presence, writing, and visualization over absence, speech, and
phantasm. In this context the critic reveals the author's strategy to
destabilize, to invert the binary terms in order to displace or remove the
very possibility of metaphysical grounds for distinguishing between what is
central and what is marginal. Since it is an exposition of another author's
deconstruction, however, applied poststructuralist criticism also assumes
another strategy. Instead of simply acknowledging destabilization, the
critic finally must reformulate the polysemy of texts according to some deep
principle from which the understanding of these texts necessarily follows.
Irrespective of the radical manifestos it draws on for its content, applied
poststructuralist criticism invariably legitimates its claims for knowledge
on the hoariest of logocentric principles--the predictive power of a
theoretical construct creating a sensible idealization of complicated
phenomena. The resulting tension reveals the dilemma of applied
poststructuralist criticism: foundationalist assumptions undergird applied
theory, even ones whose superstructure acknowledges inherent ambiguity. The
theory may reveal something about contemporary thought, it may explore
primary texts in insightful ways, but finally it begs the question that one
can represent texts in some shorthand form while maintaining the same
information content as the original.

This predicament reveals itself in two recent works of applied
poststructuralist criticism, Dissident Postmodernists: Barthelme, Coover,
Pynchon by Paul Maltby and Pynchon's Poetics: Interfacing Theory and Text by
Hanjo Berressem. Each author enters into the current conversation of
critical debate by playing off his strategies against the conventional
wisdom of poststructuralist theory. Maltby, whose discussion of Barthelme,
Coover, and Pynchon is couched in the context of the co-opting evils of late
capitalism, claims that these authors represent the "dissident" strain of
postmodernism. This strain differs from more conventional "introverted"
postmodern discourse insofar as it replaces "self-reflexive" writing, that
which simply deconstructs the processes of its own composition, with
"sign-reflective" techniques. What results, claims Maltby, is a
"metadiscourse" which, by exposing the processes of all sign systems, allows
both a degree of disengagement and a level of critical distance from sign
systems, something which in turn permits a provisional liberation of
consciousness from the hegemony of late capitalism by "unwriting" its
dominant language forms.

Berressem, who begins his book with the statement that "The creation of a
'poststructuralist Pynchon' is long overdue," claims that conventional
poststructuralist criticism has failed to come to terms with Pynchon, an
unfortunate occurrence since both focus on the same issue--the question of
the autonomy of the subject. Pynchon, Berressem argues, goes beyond the
concept of subjectivity as the radical emancipation of the signifier,
presenting instead a decentered subject in terms of a complicity between the
signifier and the signified. This requires interrelating a
surface/depth/reference approach in reading Pynchon, especially since the
issue of inter-relatedness is a significant topic within Pynchon's
discourse. To promote this vision, Berressem reads three poststructuralist
critics under the rubric of the subject: Lacan, whose linkage of
psychoanalysis and modern linguistics defines the text of the subject;
Derrida, whose concept of differance defines the subject of the text; and
Baudrillard, whose rhetorical analysis of socioeconomic issues defines the
subject in the text. By presenting the subject as the interplay between
these three positions, Berressem explores how Pynchon's work reveals--in its
intractable desire for self-destruction--the ontological, epistemological,
and sociocultural deconstruction of the subject.

To delineate the strategy of dissident postmodernism, Maltby traces the
enlargement of politics in terms of four discursive fields: the erosion of
the public sphere, state-directed communication, functionalist language, and
attenuated language. This development, Maltby argues, raises the
consciousness of language as a medium of social integration, becoming "a
defining feature" of dissident postmodernists (39). Such writers recognize
language as the site of power--they are compelled to speak in it. Maltby
concedes that in late capitalist culture the author's didactic confrontation
with an exploitive class is obsolete, since power is now diffused
linguistically throughout culture. In such a climate, the only effective
strategy is the "sign-reflective" strategy of dissident postmodernists who
use the mode of writing itself in the play of forms, plots, and tropes to
expose the hollow conventions of prevailing ideological discourse. By
exposing the limits of signification, such a text "permits a degree of
disengagement from the sign-systems in which the writer is necessarily
implicated," and in so doing, the dissident postmodernist provisionally
redeems "lost critical distance" (42).

[cont.]