Daniel Punday

Department of English and Philosophy
Purdue University Calumet
pundaydj@axp.calumet.purdue.edu

 

“It is therefore the game of the world that must be first thought; before attempting to understand all the forms of play in the world.”
 
—Of Grammatology

 

In the wake of deconstruction, critics have sought some way to reconcile poststructural textual analytics with a concern for political and cultural issues. The broad dissemination of Jean-François Lyotard’s notion of the “local” has come to embody this urge to move away from the abstract metaphysics critiqued by deconstruction for the sake of immersion in the “world.” Thus a discourse of “location” within the world has emerged as an answer to this perceived failure of deconstructive textual analysis. Typical is Susan Bordo’s departure from deconstruction:

 

In theory, deconstructionist postmodernism stands against the ideal of disembodied knowledge and declares that ideal to be a mystification and an impossibility…. The question remains, however, how the human knower is to negotiate this infinitely perspectival, destabilized world. Deconstructionism answers with constant vigilant suspicion of all determinate readings of culture and a partner aesthetic of ceaseless textual play as an alternative ideal. Here is where deconstruction may slip into its own fantasy of escape from human locatedness–by supposing that the critic can become wholly protean by adopting endlessly shifting, seemingly inexhaustible vantage points, none of which are “owned” by either the critic or the author of a text under examination. (142)

 

As a result, Bordo argues, deconstruction claims to be the view from everywhere and nowhere, thus failing to recognize its own “locatedness” within the world. In other words, deconstruction’s abstract textual theory must give way to a concern for “location” if we are to analyze cultural and social issues.

 

Critical “location” has been an especially important and problematic issue in postmodern feminism, where the emphasis on such positioning is coupled with the need to critique mainstream culture. The local, according to Lyotard, is to be a counterforce to the broad narratives that deconstruction has unraveled. Yet, critics find almost immediately that the local has no pragmatic, critical value without such broader narratives. In considering how, for example, one might analyze local instances of gender politics, we are immediately confronted by the metaphysical assumptions implicit within terms such as “man” and “woman,” and forced to construct a larger theoretical apparatus to organize them. Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson describe the problem this way: “Suppose… that one defined that object [of social criticism] as the subordination of women to and by men. Then, we submit, it would be apparent that many of the [metanarrative] genres rejected by postmodernists are necessary for social criticism. For a phenomenon as pervasive and multifaceted as male dominance simply cannot be adequately grasped with the meager critical resources to which they would limit us” (26). Thus, although critics may recognize location as a crucial element of the modeling of social space, when they turn to actual critical praxis and analyze texts for their representation of gender, they find it difficult to operate using the model without accepting some traditional metalanguage. Critics have thus gone to the extreme of claiming that, although master narratives are to be avoided, critics in certain circumstances might be granted a theoretical waiver: “Formulating wrongs, on the other hand, can make use of theory. Victims might turn to existing theories or even themselves theorize when striving to phrase the wrongs signaled by their feelings and so on” (Schatzki 49). Critics fall back upon rather conventional critical models precisely because “local” criticism seems to provide no alternative method for analyzing particular textual features and conflicts in relation to this “locatedness.”

 

In order to recover a sense of how texts reflect and engage with the location from which they are analyzed, we need to return to deconstruction through the thematics of location. Critics who debate the use and nature of the local have generally assumed that deconstruction and the world are naturally opposed.¹ Certainly, the use to which deconstruction was put in its heyday–as a tool for a type of close reading, a hyper-New Criticism–supports this opposition. I will offer a more sophisticated model of deconstruction’s engagement with the world, and suggest that the concept of critical “location” is reconcilable and indeed crucial to deconstruction. Understanding this engagement helps us to link the model of society based on the “local” with the demands of actual critical practice. Bordo’s call to discuss the “location” of the deconstructive critic is a call to consider deconstruction as a form of critical praxis carried out within a political and cultural context. Inherent to this call is a theory of the space of culture, of interpretation, and of texts. As we attempt to develop a theory of post-deconstructive critical practice that is sensitive both to political location and to textual dynamics, our first step will be to consider the nature of deconstructive space. By recognizing the assumed model of space operating within post-deconstructive criticism–especially in post-deconstructive feminism–we can see how Derrida’s work is being misread. This space will lead us into a consideration of the deconstructive critic’s position between text and world–what I will call, following Derrida, the “worldliness” of the two. Once we recognize that deconstruction operates with an understanding of this worldly position of text and reader, we will be able to articulate much more sophisticated links between the textual analysis associated with deconstruction and the interest in political location that has developed in its wake.

 

Rethinking Deconstructive Space

 

A shared spatial language that allows us to speak of texture, movement, layers and boundaries is the closest connection between deconstruction and the post-deconstructive analysis of “location.”² In one sense, post-deconstructive criticism simply shifts this play from the text to the world, reading social relations in the same way that concepts and words were read by the deconstructionist. This strategy is built upon attempts to explicate deconstruction as a more or less politically neutral tool that can be used for political purposes. Rarely is this more brazen than in Michael Ryan’s Marxism and Deconstruction (1982), where the two terms of Ryan’s title appear to be mutually exclusive and to supplement each other perfectly: “Deconstruction is a philosophical interrogation of some of the major concepts and practices of philosophy. Marxism, in contrast, is not a philosophy. It names revolutionary movements” (1). This belief that deconstruction has no inherent concern for politics and location is carried over into more sophisticated post-deconstructive writing. Consider, for example, Teresa de Lauretis’s introduction to Feminist Studies/Critical Studies, a work typical of the attempt to formulate post-deconstructive critical practice. De Lauretis treats the world as a space in which social relations conflict and transform when she notes in recent feminism “a shift from the earlier view of woman defined purely by sexual difference (i.e., in relation to man) to the more difficult and complex notion that the female subject is a site of differences; differences that are not only sexual or only racial, economic, or (sub)cultural, but all of these together and often enough at odds with one another” (14). De Lauretis implies that individuals within social relations function according to a deconstructive model to the extent that we can describe them as inhabiting a space of conflict between overlapping cultural systems and networks. Such a formulation shifts Derrida’s language of hinge, play, trace and boundary from the text to the culture, paralleling cultural space to textual space and individuals to terms caught within a play of différance. At the same time, however, this post-deconstructive criticism also assumes that these social relations function not merely like deconstructive textual play, but also on the basis of it. Thus, de Lauretis quotes Wittig’s remark that hegemony “produces the difference between the sexes as a political and philosophical dogma” (13). This remark bases social reality on a more literal Derridian play, assuming that within any culture there exists a trans-textual space in which these terms arise and on the basis of which social relations are constructed. This clearly carries a different emphasis than the previous passage, where the space of conflict was “real” and the elements under consideration were not terms but individuals. This post-deconstructive criticism thus imports deconstructive spatiality both as a model for speaking about social relations and as a textual system by which those relations are taken to have been constructed in the first place. The result is a sort of kettle logic, a criticism that uses deconstructive spatiality in several contradictory ways.

 

This contradiction plays a strategic role within the functioning of post-deconstructive critical praxis. One of the principle charges leveled at deconstruction is that it allows the individual no room to act against the discursive systems that function within the culture, since the subordination of reality to textuality implies that no real-world act can affect this textual play. The dual way in which critics have appropriated deconstructive space actually helps them to open up this possibility. Consider, for example, Chris Weedon’s discussion of the political freedom opened up by (an appropriation of) deconstructive space:

 

Even when the principles of “différance” are inscribed in an historically specific account of discourses, signifiers remain plural and the possibility of absolute or true meaning is deferred. The precariousness of any attempt to fix meaning which involves a fixing of subjectivity must rely on the denial of the principles of difference and deferral. The assertion of “truth” involved is constantly vulnerable to resistance and the redefinition of meaning…. As individuals we are not the mere objects of language but the sites of discursive struggle, a struggle that takes place in the consciousness of the individual. (105-6)

 

Weedon here straddles two appropriations of deconstructive space in order to define a type of “discursive struggle” in which the individual has the potential to be a conscious and active participant. Weedon accepts the more literal deconstructive notion of space as a textual matter, in which terms play out through différance in a way that makes any term ultimately unstable. At the same time, however, Weedon also accepts the analogy between textuality and social space, defining the space in which individuals interact as merely like this textual space. This latter, analogical use of deconstructive space allows Weedon to emphasize the role of individuals as the site of struggle. To accept either of these spatial models solely would limit Weedon’s image of discursive freedom. To accept deconstructive space as purely textual denies the primacy of the individual; to accept deconstructive space as merely an analogy denies the “precariousness” of meaning and limits the individual’s ability to fight against hegemony. This dual, contradictory appropriation of deconstructive space thus makes possible a vision of political freedom. Such contradictory roots for post-deconstructive space also explain, however, why critics have found it so difficult to justify the use of this space theoretically. From this perspective the “local site” seems to be an inconsistent construction incapable of being justified or extended to a larger system of critical interpretation.

 

I would like to suggest that these contradictions arise out of the mistaken assumption that deconstructive spatiality has no inherent connection to the concept of world, and thus must be appropriated in various ways. Implicit within this appropriation of deconstructive space in these two ways is a misunderstanding of Derridian space as a flat field and as a mere way of speaking. Both Weedon and de Lauretis assume that deconstructive space is a single plane in which elements (terms or individual subjects) meet, conflict, and transform. This understanding of deconstructive space is not unique to post-deconstructive criticism, but instead can be traced back to the widespread reading of deconstruction as a purely rhetorical discipline. Barbara Johnson, for example, applies deconstruction to literature in an attempt at “identifying and dismantling differences by means of other differences that cannot be fully identified or dismantled” (x). Johnson does this by treating language as the source of exteriority within the text, and as a result casts Derridian space as a metaphor: “The differences between entities (prose and poetry, man and woman, literature and theory, guilt and innocence) are shown to be based on a repression of differences within entities, ways in which an entity differs from itself” (x-xi). Space for Johnson is simply a way of speaking, a way of defining the lack of self-presence in individual terms and their dependence on a metonymic “differing.” This understanding of Derridian space has led critics to reduce textual play to a simple metonymic substitution of linguistic terms, and to see Derrida as cut off from more “worldly” concerns. It is in this sense that Edward Said describes Derridian space:

 

All this establishes a sort of perpetual interchange in Derrida’s work between the page and the theater stage. Yet the locale of the interchange–itself a page and a theater–is Derrida’s prose, which in his recent work attempts to work less by chronological sequence, logical order, and linear movement than by abrupt, extremely difficult-to-follow lateral and complementary movement. The intention that movement is to make Derrida’s page become the apparently self-sufficient site of a critical reading, in which traditional texts, authors, problems, and themes are presented in order to be dedefined and dethematicized more or less permanently. (202-3)

 

Said suggests that Derrida’s language is a self-contained stage within which terms undergo a ceaseless transformation. Behind this characterization of Derrida’s textual stage is the same assumption that Johnson makes: textuality is merely a metonymic substitution, and any space attributed to the text must be merely a metaphor, a way of speaking.

 

This simplification of deconstructive space is not without its benefits for post-deconstructive criticism. Post-deconstructive criticism defines its own relevance to the world, we can suggest, by strategically keeping deconstruction out of the world. That is, by simplifying deconstructive space into a metaphorical stage through which textual slippage can be described, recent critics have made room for themselves to appropriate deconstruction for a more politically-engaged criticism. Yet in doing so, these critics have produced a post-deconstructive space whose contradictions preclude its theoretical justification and articulation into a larger critical praxis. That Derrida does not accept the understanding of textual space as a simple field is quite explicit within his writing. Derrida finds Freud’s “Mystic Writing Tablet” interesting exactly because of its violation of geometrical consistency:

 

Differences in the work of breaching concern not only forces but also locations. And Freud already wants to think force and place simultaneously. He is the first not to believe in the descriptive value of his hypothetical representation of breaching…. It is, rather, the index of a topographical description which external space, that is, familiar and constituted space, the exterior space of the natural sciences, cannot contain. (“Freud” 204)

 

Derrida’s discussion of deconstructive space always involves the movement away from classical models of geometric space and thus rejects any notion of a textual “field.” Critics have had difficulty coming to terms with Derrida’s non-linear space because, as we have seen in Johnson, attention to the “sliding” and “exteriority” of terms within a text seems naturally to presuppose some (metaphorical) field upon which they function. In other words, Derrida’s non-linear space is easier to understand in the abstract than it is to insert within a system of critical praxis. It is for this reason that Rodolphe Gasché’s treatment of Derrida as a philosopher is perhaps the most satisfying discussion of Derridian space. Unlike Johnson, Gasché resists the temptation to reduce exteriority to a way of speaking about rhetorical substitution, and thus is able to understand space as something thematized by Derrida:

 

Recall that the relation to an Other constitutive of a self, whose minimal unit is the arche-trace, presupposes an interval which at once affects and makes possible the relation of self to Other and divides the self within itself. In the same way, differance as the production of a polemical space of differences both presupposes and produces the intervals between concepts, notions, terms, and so on. In that sense, arche-trace and differance, each in a different manner, are spacing. From the perspective of arche-trace, spacing “is the opening of the first exteriority in general, the enigmatic relationship of the living to its other and of an inside to an outside.” (199; citing Derrida, Of Grammatology 70)

 

According to Gasché, Derrida’s non-linear notion of space has its roots in the production of potential space, in space as an undertaking rather than as a metaphorical field. The difficulty of translating this production of space, presented as a philosophical claim in Gasché, into critical praxis functioning “within the world” has driven critics, on the one hand, to Johnson’s textualism and, on the other, to Weedon’s contradictory appropriation of deconstructive space.

 

Derrida’s richest articulation of a non-linear space is his essay “Ousia and Gramme,” an essay that can guide us away from the simplified deconstructive space that we have observed thus far. This essay is explicitly about time and the philosophical tradition that has described it in spatial terms. Derrida claims that philosophers have consistently denied temporality for the sake of the presence implied by spatial forms. Derrida does not, of course, reject this spatiality in favor of some direct understanding of temporality. Temporality can never be self-present, and thus can never be known except by how it modifies the spatial models that philosophers attempt to impose upon it. The essay describes, then, a very complex space that results from the attempt to account for time, a space that comes up against the limits of presence. Derrida begins with Hegel’s dialectical model of space. Such dialectics have, for Derrida, a general similarity to the movement of différance, thus allowing Derrida to begin with an already unstable and active approach to space. Two different ways of understanding space arise in three stages by dividing the initial immediacy and completeness of the ideal term, “space.” Derrida writes, paraphrasing Hegel,

 

Differentiation, determination, qualification can only overtake pure space as the negation of this original purity and of this initial state of abstract indifferentiation which is properly the spatiality of space. Pure spatiality is determined by negating properly the indetermination that constitutes it, that is, by itself negates itself. By itself negating itself: this negation has to be a determined negation, a negation of space by space. The first spatial negation of space is the POINT. (41)

 

In this passage, Derrida considers how an initial term (pure space) contains within itself an implied differentiation that transforms it into a different understanding of space (the point) in many ways opposed to that initial term. The first and third stages represent two different ways of understanding space–“pure” space and the point. The middle stage of this textual transformation involves postulating a certain ground on which these two terms interact, the stage upon which this transformation occurs–what Derrida refers to elsewhere as “opening up of its own space, effraction, breaking of a path against resistances, rupture and irruption become a route” (“Freud” 214). For Hegel, concrete space is the product of the work of negation, the third stage of the dialectic. Here, however, Derrida departs from Hegel and defines what appears to be the most concrete and fundamental space as a textual ground that allows the movement between the first and third positions. This transitional space is implied by the active terms that this passage employs, in which the terms “space” themselves: “As the first determination and first negation of space, the point spatializes or spaces itself. It negates itself by itself in its relation to itself, that is, to another point. The negation of negation, the spatial negation of the point is the line. The point negates and retains itself, extends and sustains itself, lifts itself (by Aufhebung) into the LINE, which thus constitutes the truth of the point” (“Ousia” 42). This dialectical transformation produces a space by virtue of the force implicit within this transformation, a force that demands a ground upon which to function. Derrida, then, borrows from Hegel the idea that space is produced by this ongoing transformation of concepts; he departs from Hegel by seeing this production as, paradoxically, what allows the movement in the first place.

 

Derrida’s model of this paradoxically produced and preconditional space is the “gramme,” which most clearly summarizes Derrida’s departure from the flat-field space that has characterized most deconstructive criticism. Literally the gramme refers to a line or trace; more generally it is the spatial rendering of temporal movement. As a spatialization of time, the gramme is the accumulation of moments or points taken as “in act”–that is, moving towards some end and thus referring to a telos of their whole movement. Derrida is dissatisfied with this telos-based model of the gramme because it assumes the self-presence of each point. Such a model, applied to time, simply repeats the metaphysical tradition of spatialization and presence. Nonetheless, Derrida is able to reaccentuate the gramme in a way that allows it to function in a less self-present, more temporal fashion. To do this, Derrida shifts the locus of the gramme to the limit:

 

But if one considers now that the point, as limit, does not exist in act, is not (present), exists only potentially and by accident, takes its existence only from the line in act, then it is not impossible to preserve the analogy of the gramme: on the condition that one does not take it as a series of potential limits, but as a line in act, as a line thought on the basis of its extremities (ta eskhata) and not of its parts. (“Ousia” 59-60)

 

Derrida argues that, rather than locating the limit within each point, the space that the gramme provides should be understood as made up of a whole movement that passes through each point “accidentally” but without granting any point self-presence. Rather, the presence of each point is always deferred to the whole movement, which itself is not self-present but potential and multiple. The space of the temporal gramme is not separable into distinct points, but constantly renegotiates different limits and boundaries that are not simply arbitrary but dependent on the possible “paths” of movement that the text opens up. This gramme echoes but makes more specific the space we saw appear out of the play of terms–a space produced temporarily by reference to the “extremes” and out of the movement of signification.

 

We can say that Derrida’s writing completes the transition from older, linear models of space to a more dynamic space that is much discussed in current criticism, but which has been incompletely understood. Classical geometrical space in many ways reaches its apotheosis in structuralism, where the abstract space that critics like Henri Lefebvre have associated with modern culture is taken to be a basic condition of all meaning. A clear embodiment of this geometrical space is A.J. Greimas’s “semiotic square,” a model of four contrasting elements whose relations are said to organize the more concrete elements within a text, language, or culture. Critics have recognized that deconstruction marks a break from this kind of geometrical space, and have suggested that deconstructive space will be characterized by what Fredric Jameson has called the abolition of “the distinction between the inside and the outside” (98). Jameson’s best example of this deconstructive space is the Frank Gehry House discussed in Postmodernism, a house in which traditional living spaces have been “wrapped” by other architectural units in a way that dissolves conventional ways of thinking about the inside and outside of the house: “What is wrapped can also be used as the wrapper; the wrapper can also be wrapped in its turn” (101-102). This kind of space is frequently called “postmodern” by critics like Jameson to suggest that it is a simple fact of contemporary culture. We have seen that Derrida’s writing, however, affirms neither this postmodern nor the traditional, geometrical spatial models. Indeed, when critics of “location” have sought to make a break from deconstruction and move into a genuinely post-deconstructive space, as we have seen, in many ways they have simply repeated in problematic ways the deconstructive/postmodern space that dissolves the distinction between inside and outside. There is no space that is outside of politics, these critics note, no way in which the space of the text is not always already influenced by the “external” political environment in which it is read.³ In Derrida’s own writings, however, we have seen a theory that escapes the space associated with deconstruction. Space here is neither static and flat, nor is it simply a matter of unending reversals of outside and inside. Instead, Derridian space–which I will call properly post-deconstructive in the sense that it already recognizes the problems implicit within the type of space mistakenly associated with deconstruction–is interested in how spaces are constructed through reference to the outside, by taking up positions in which these sites of analysis are defined. These spaces are neither fixed nor infinitely unstable, but rather dynamically produced by reference to the limits and ultimately, as I will show, to the “location” from which they are read.

 

Différance and Worldliness

 

In the gramme Derrida offers a model of a kind of space that is dynamic rather than static, and which provides the basis for thinking about the relation between this space and textual analysis. Derrida is not, of course, the only critic to reject the static spaces of traditional criticism and the simplistic deconstructive spaces that I have criticized in the first section. Indeed, in a number of post-deconstructive theories we can see the development of just such a space. One of the most sophisticated is Laclau and Mouffe’s Marxist writing on hegemony and the construction of a class agent. These critics reject the stable field of social space and insist instead that class identity must always be thought on another level: “The political character of the hegemonic link is fundamental, implying as it does that the terrain on which the link establishes itself is different from that on which the social agents are constituted…. This exteriority [of the hegemonic link] was the root of those paradoxical situations in which the communist militant typically found himself” (55). Such a space works against the dissolution of the line between inside and outside that Jameson associates with postmodernist space, even while complicating traditional ways of understanding this line:

 

The incomplete character of every totality necessarily leads us to abandon, as a terrain of analysis, the premise of “society” as a sutured and self-defined totality. “Society” is not a valid object of discourse. There is no single underlying principle fixing–and hence constituting–the whole field of differences. The irresoluble interiority/exteriority tension is the condition of any social practice: necessity only exists as a partial limitation on the field of contingency. It is in this terrain, where neither a total interiority nor a total exteriority is possible, that the social is constituted. (111)

 

The result is a model of space, like that of Derrida, in which the outside of a discourse is thought as a necessary component of the construction of social space. What distinguishes Derrida’s dynamic spaces articulated through the gramme from the complex spaces developed by such sophisticated recent theories is that for Derrida even these extremities are produced through textual analysis. This has two effects. First, it steps away from the danger evident in Laclau and Mouffe’s work of assigning this multi-leveled social space some kind of metaphysical status–of suggesting that a real discursive space exists with stable, albeit complex, characteristics. Derrida’s exteriority is always produced out of particular textual necessities, rather than being an inherent part of social space that will appear over and over again in much the same way.⁴ Second and more importantly, by linking this space to textual analysis, Derrida makes his social model a natural basis for critical practice in a way that other sophisticated post-deconstructive models cannot be. Derrida develops a post-deconstructionist space in a way that makes it particularly available to textual analysis. Especially in feminist practice, this ability to translate space into tools for revealing patterns–let us say, of sexism–is essential to its effectiveness.

 

What links this complex spatial model to the kind of textual play that we usually associate with deconstruction–and thus the key to Derrida’s theory of space and location–is the ontological instability of the objects that appear within this space. Indeed, one of the reasons that deconstructive space is usually misdefined as a flat field is in order to account for the tensions and conflicts between the terms that are deployed within that space. According to traditional readings of deconstruction, the text creates a space by positing potential “others” that open up a space for the play of différance. Critics reduce Derridian space to this flat field by homogenizing the ontology of these textual elements–that is, treating the element and its others as terms that “exist” in a similar way. This ontological homogenization can perhaps be traced back to a general critical tendency to understand the play of difference and alterity on the model of an individual’s confrontation with his or her social, sexual, or racial “other.” The first description of différance in Terry Eagleton’s widely used Literary Theory: An Introduction follows this pattern: “Woman is the opposite, the ‘other’ of man: she is non-man, defective man, assigned a chiefly negative value in relation to the male first principle. But equally man is what he is only by virtue of ceaselessly shutting out his other or opposite, defining himself in antithesis to it, and his whole identity is therefore caught up and put at risk in the very gesture by which he seeks to assert his unique, autonomous existence” (132). Despite the validity of Eagleton’s summary, this example is dangerous as a general model for différance because it treats the ontological status of the two elements (self and other) as equivalent. Such equivalence demands that the ontological ground of their confrontation be fixed, since such a ground defines the very possibility of these two terms acting as an “other.” In formulating the gramme as a model for the productive, temporalized space of deconstruction, however, Derrida works against exactly this presupposition of ontological equivalence between the elements of différance. Derrida is careful to avoid claiming that the various points within the gramme are self-present; rather, he emphasizes that the gramme marks out a play of potential or accidental points. Within the space marked out by the gramme, such points will seem ontologically fixed; a glance to the limit, however, reveals them as “accidental” and their existence as very much at issue. Only by recognizing an ontological difference functioning within the elements of textual play can deconstructive space avoid being fixed and instead function as something in process.

 

Textual objects staged within deconstructive space can be seen as fluttering between an ideal, conceptual existence and a concrete, material status. Indeed, one of the principle things that Derrida gains by beginning “Ousia and Gramme” with Hegel is the ability to cast his discussion in terms of concreteness. This is clear in Derrida’s summary of Hegel:

 

Space… has become concrete in having retained the negative within itself. It has become space in losing itself, in determining itself, in negating its original purity, the absolute indifferentiation and exteriority that constituted itself in its spatiality. Spatialization, the accomplishment of the essence of spatiality, is a despatialization and vice versa. (42)

 

Whereas the concrete is something produced for Hegel as the end of a teleological process, for Derrida it is a much more ambiguous and transient moment within this movement. We can see the initial play of space in “Ousia and Gramme” as turning on exactly this concrete/conceptual tension. The space that arises in the play of terms is concrete because it is the larger, alloyed space that comprises these two abstract definitions of space and in which they meet and clash. This space is conceptual, however, because it is the concreteness of this term (“space”) that opens up the possibility of polysemy and the slippage between two different understandings of the term; such a transitional space is always a conceptual supplement to a concrete term. This concrete/conceptual tension is implicit within the “pure space” from which Derrida (and Hegel) start: “Nature, as ‘absolute space’… knows no mediation, no difference, no determination, no discontinuity. It corresponds to what the Jena Logic called ether: the element of ideal transparency, of absolute indifferentiation, of undetermined continuity, of absolute juxtaposition, that is, the element without interior relations” (41). What opens “pure space” up to deconstruction is that at times it seems concrete and at others abstract.

 

This fluttering between concrete and conceptual is essential to textual différance, and is ubiquitous in Derrida’s writing. Implicit within Derrida’s tendency to describe terms as functioning actively within a play of différance is this dramatization of the dually concrete and conceptual nature of textual elements. Indeed, one of the simplest and best-known characterizations of deconstruction is as a method of reading that suspends the reference of textual elements in order to treat them in largely material terms. One thinks, in this context, of Derrida’s discussion of Nietzsche’s umbrella in Spurs, where a particular textual object becomes the occasion for a discussion of style precisely because the referential context of that object is suspended and the qualities of the object itself instead are explored. Gregory Ulmer offers this discussion as evidence that Derrida’s methods are essentially “allegorical,” stressing the ambiguous materiality of the text: “The ‘double’ structure of style–relevant to the problem of allegorical representation which at once reveals and conceals–finds, in the ‘morphology’ of the umbrella with its shaft and fabric, a concrete model. Derrida borrows the ‘umbrella’ left behind in Nietzsche’s Notebooks and remotivates it (its meaning was indeterminate in any case) as a de-monstrative device” (“Object” 99). Ulmer sees Derrida’s methods as allegorical because they take a textual object as a concrete embodiment of abstract textual play. But, of course, the opposite is also the case. When Derrida uses the concrete historical traces and erasures buried within a particular word–the “primitive meaning, the original, and always sensory and material, figure” studied in “White Mythology” (211) for example–as the suppressed basis for the conceptual work that depends upon these words, he ultimately returns to the conceptual, the “logic implicit in this text” (210). Ulmer sees this allegorical functioning as best embodied by the mechanical “apparatus” of writing in Derridian theory (Applied Grammatology 81-83). Derrida discusses the role and the ontological problems introduced by the apparatus of writing most directly in his Mystic Writing Pad essay:

 

Writing, here, is techne as the relation between life and death, between present and representation, between the two apparatuses. It opens up the question of the technics: of the apparatus in general and of the analogy between the psychical apparatus and the nonpsychical apparatus. In this sense writing is the stage of history and the play of the world. It cannot be exhausted by psychology alone. (“Freud” 228)

 

Freud’s model of the Mystic Writing Pad is interesting for Derrida in part because it introduces the issue of the apparatus that, as this passage suggests, can never remain simply a conceptual analogy. Indeed, we can see this hesitation between the concrete and the conceptual as the basis of writing and its deconstructive effects. Without this concrete/conceptual ambiguity, a term could not be described as undergoing the kind of slippage that Derrida describes in “Ousia and Gramme” and elsewhere. In Speech and Phenomena, for example, Derrida’s treatment of the opposition between expression and indication turns on the issue of the concrete. In that analysis, Derrida opposes the concrete, situational indication to the ideal, “nonworldly” expression. What drives Derrida’s analysis and deconstruction of these terms is how the concrete nonetheless reappears even out of the movement towards the ideal. Thus, expression moves from being an ideal “nonworldliness [that] is not another worldliness” to become re-entangled within the concrete world: “The opposition between form and matter–which inaugurates metaphysics–finds in the concrete ideality of the living present its ultimate and radical justification” (6). In all of these instances Derrida treats the fluttering between the concrete and the conceptual as the basis of textual construction.

 

The ontological indeterminacy of textual space embodies and repeats the ontological play of différance itself. More importantly, however, the ontological complexities of deconstructive space also reflect its position between text and world–as both a metaphor applied by a critic and as something genuinely functioning as space. Derrida’s Edmund Husserl’s “Origin of Geometry”: An Introduction concerns itself with exactly this problem of the origin of space in the science of geometry: “There is then a science of space, insofar as its starting point is not in space” (85). Geometry conceives space in contradictory terms: space is concrete within current geometry and metaphorical in the early geometer’s protoidealizations of space. Similarly, Derrida ends Positions with the problem of space and the degree to which it can be taken as equivalent to alterity–that is, the degree to which it is a metaphor for a conceptual exteriority. Derrida notes that “In effect, these two concepts do not signify exactly the same thing; that being said, I believe that they are absolutely indissociable” (81). Derrida elaborates further:

 

Spacing/alterity: On their indissociability, then, there is no disagreement between us. I have always underlined at least two characteristics in the analysis of spacing, as I recalled in the course of the interview: (1) That spacing is the impossibility for an identity to be closed on itself, on the inside of its proper interiority, or on its coincidence with itself. The irreducibility of spacing is the irreducibility of the other. (2) That “spacing” designates not only interval, but a “productive,” “genetic,” “practical” movement, an “operation,” if you will, in its Mallarméan sense also” (94).

 

Derrida seems to have in mind an opposition between, on the one hand, space as a metaphor for alterity (the impossibility of identity) and, on the other, space as something concrete and productive in its own terms. The ontological ambiguity of space thus both embodies the ontological play within the text and references its position between text and critic.

 

Derrida is concerned, we might say, with the “worldly” rather than with the world. Perhaps Derrida’s most concise comment on this world comes at a point in Of Grammatology where Derrida considers the materiality of the trace and what it means for signification: “It is therefore the game of the world that must be first thought; before attempting to understand all the forms of play in the world” (50). This passage occurs in the context of considering Saussure’s claim that the connections among elements of a signifying system are arbitrary, a claim critics have often extended to characterize différance as a shapeless “freeplay.” Derrida’s counterargument is that to treat these elements as arbitrary is to assume that they are concrete things in the world, whose existence is independent of the meaning given them. Instead, Derrida suggests, we must see writing as caught up within a whole system of making these terms worldly and thus arbitrarily inserted within a phonetic system:

 

From the very opening of the game, then, we are within the becoming-unmotivated of the symbol. With regard to this becoming, the opposition of diachronic and synchronic is also derived. It would not be able to command a grammatology pertinently. The immotivation of the trace ought now to be understood as an operation and not as a state, as an active movement, a demotivation, and not as a given structure. (50-51)

 

For Derrida, the system of language as pure difference depends on the move into the world, on the stripping away of causality for the sake of a concreteness that is the possibility of signifiers being defined as arbitrarily associated with signifieds. Saussure’s fundamental distinction between signifier and signified is, then, the product of “the game of the world,” the functioning of a process of “worlding.” It is exactly this play of the ideaof the world, the always incomplete movement towards the world, that operates within writing as an “apparatus” and that sets within the text the play of the concrete and conceptual:

 

Since consciousness for Freud is a surface exposed to the external world, it is here that instead of reading through the metaphor in the usual sense, we must, on the contrary, understand the possibility of a writing advanced as conscious and as acting in the world (the visible exterior of the graphism, of the literal, of the literal becoming literary, etc.) in terms of the labor of the writing which circulated like psychical energy between the unconscious and the conscious. The “objectivist” or “worldly” consideration of writing teaches us nothing if reference is not made to a space of psychical writing…. We perhaps should think that what we are describing here as the labor of writing erases the transcendental distinction between the origin of the world and Being-in-the-world. Erases it while producing it. (“Freud” 212)

 

For Derrida, then, the world as a problem defines the apparatus of the text and thus introduces a slippage between the concrete and the conceptual.

 

The Structure of Critical Praxis

 

In linking the dynamic space developed in the gramme to the ontological status of objects represented in the text, Derrida accomplishes something that other critics–even those with sophisticated spatial models–fail to do. He develops a basis for critical practice that does not simply revert to the acceptance of traditional metanarratives for defining this practice–as we have seen so often in deconstructive and post-deconstructive criticism. Indeed, I would like to suggest that Derrida’s model of space and ontology can be used to address concerns of critical location that have sparked the movement “beyond” deconstruction. I will, specifically, argue that this theory of textual “worldliness” based on the play of the conceptual and the concrete is not merely an abstract condition of the text; instead it produces a differentiated and relatively fixed structure of analysis and critical location.

 

Space’s ability to straddle the text and the world depends on Derrida’s understanding of the “topos” or occasion of writing. In his early essay, “Force and Signification,” Derrida distinguishes between the topographical and the topological, arguing that we cannot directly correlate space and textuality:

 

Now, stricto sensu, the notion of structure refers only to space, geometric or morphological space, the order of forms and sites…. Only metaphorically was this topographical literality displaced in the direction of its Aristotelean and topical signification (the theory of commonplaces in language and the manipulation of motifs or arguments). (15-16)

 

Rather than accepting topography as a natural part of the text or rejecting it as a misunderstanding of textuality, Derrida considers the production of textual space out of a spatial self-reflection built into all textual language: “How is this history of metaphor possible? Does the fact that language can determine things only by spatializing them suffice to explain that, in return, language must spatialize itself as soon as it designates and reflects upon itself?” (16). Not only must language spatialize the world (as we saw in “Ousia and Gramme”), but it also relies on an implicit spatialization functioning whenever the linguistic slippage at work in différance forces the text to reflect on itself. The connection between the articulation of a text and the appearance of space is most clearly explained by Derrida’s notion of lieu as both a spatial site and a rhetorical topos. What Alan Bass translates in the passage above as “the theory of commonplaces in language,” Derrida describes in the original as “théorie des lieux dans le langage” (28). Derrida’s emphasis here on topoi as lieuxallows him to suggest a necessary complicity between textual articulation and the creation of textual topography. Derrida makes this association clear elsewhere:

 

The topoi of the dialogue are never indifferent. The themes, the topics, the (common-)places [les lieux], in a rhetorical sense, are strictly inscribed, comprehended each time within a significant site [des sites chaque fois signifiants]. They are dramatically staged, and in this theatrical geography, unity of place corresponds to an infallible calculation or necessity. (Dissemination 69; original French 77)

 

In this passage Derrida plays on the distinction between the rhetorical topos and the physical site, implying that the topos allows the working-out of the geography dictated by the topography. The topos here is the means by which the topography manifests itself and textual necessity plays out, the means by which the site that circumscribes it appears. In “Force and Signification,” Derrida defines the topographical as dependent on a previously existing site: “Structure is first the structure of an organic or artificial work, the internal unity of an assemblage, a construction; a work is governed by a unifying principle, the architecture that is built and made visible in a location” (15). Derrida suggests that a textual topography depends on the existence of a topos through which it is “made visible.” The lieu thus holds together text and the analytic “occasion” through which it is articulated by virtue of its very ontological instability, its slippage between concrete topographical site and the rhetorical topos.

 

This notion of the lieu is very similar to what critics have described as the “local site.” Elspeth Probyn suggests the necessity of this ontological indeterminacy in her characterization of the local site: “the concept of ‘locale’ will be used to designate a place that is the setting for a particular event. I take this ‘place’ as both a discursive and nondiscursive arrangement which holds a gendered event, the home being the most obvious example” (178). Probyn recognizes that the “locale” must exist in a problematic way as both part of discourse, and as something opposed to it–or, in the terms I have used, as conceptual and concrete. The difference between place and event (Probyn’s example is the distinction between home and the family) marks the fluctuation between concrete space and the interpellating (conceptual) representations that appear within that space. As for Derrida, this concrete/conceptual ambiguity arises when space comes up against its limit and recognizes the temporal–summarized nicely by Probyn’s casting of the concrete/conceptual ambiguity in terms of place and event. Probyn inherits this concrete/conceptual tension and its formulation as the play between place and event from Lyotard. When Lyotard suggests that “any consensus on the rules defining a [language] game and the ‘moves’ playable within it must be local, in other words, agreed on by its present players and subject to eventual cancellation” (66), he defines discursive action as constantly fluctuating between using and changing the “rules” of this interaction. Any reference, then, fluctuates between taking this “locale” concretely as a given base for communication, and renegotiating the boundaries of discourse conceptually. As for Derrida, this ontological ambiguity allows the site to “hold” contradictions. For Lyotard, this means that the local produces knowledge by (the possibility of) negating its base: “working on a proof means searching for and ‘inventing’ counterexamples, in other words, the unintelligible; supporting an argument means looking for a ‘paradox’ and legitimating it with new rules in the games of reasoning” (54). Lyotard suggests here that the very possibility of rejecting the site, of switching from the concrete to the conceptual understanding of this local space, is the means by which the contradictions that drive the “game” are worked through. Probyn follows the same reasoning in her use of Lyotard:

 

In this formulation the bricoleur actively pieces together different signs and produces new (and sometimes unsanctioned) meanings; the bricoleur is always in the process of fashioning her various locales. The concept of “locale” then serves to emphasize the lived contradictions of place and event. In acknowledging that we are daily involved in the reproduction of patriarchy we can nonetheless temper a vision of strict interpellation with the recognition that discourses are negotiated. Individuals live in complex places and differentiate the pull of events. (182)

 

According to Probyn, the site or locale holds contradictions and allows their analysis precisely because of the difference between “place” and “event”–that is, because of the ontological ambiguity of the site under analysis. Probyn does not simply suggest that the locale can be valued over the event or representation–that is, that we can strip away the representation for the sake of this concrete place. Rather, she recognizes that the very space in which women operate is constructed as part of a necessary duality with representation. Thus, to use Probyn’s example, one can have a proper “home” (as a space) only to the extent that one has a family of some sort–that is, only to the extent that space is bound to and even produced from a representation. The “reproduction of patriarchy” thus is not seamless but reveals its contradictions through the ontological ambiguity of the space in which it appears.

 

This system can be understood as the structure of deconstructive praxis–something both created by the deconstructive critic and delimiting the path of analysis. Derrida makes this clear in “Ousia and Gramme” in discussing how the gramme can “hold” the force of textual play because of the action of an observer: “The impossible–the coexistence of two nows–appears only in a synthesis–taking this word neutrally, implying no position, no activity, no agent–let us say in a certain complicity or coimplication maintaining together several current nows which are said to be the one past and the other future” (55). In this passage Derrida plays on the association of the now [maintenant] and the act of “maintaining” contradictions within a structure whose presence (and present) is undermined by its necessary reference to an exterior position. If, as Derrida suggests, this position is not a direct result of such an observer’s interaction with the object of synthesis, this structure nonetheless defines a certain space for such an observer that is a condition of this “now.” In describing this external role as one of “maintenance,” Derrida stresses the observer’s role in balancing the physical textual forces in terms of which Derrida describes space and time earlier in the essay: “Ousia as energeia, in opposition to dynamis (movement, power) is presence. Time, which bears within it the already-no-longer and the not-yet, is composite. In it, energy composes with power” (51). In “maintaining” the temporality of the text as a force, this external position renders it concrete, something that can be analyzed in the text as a thing. Indeed, Derrida’s description of the text as an apparatus–so basic to the text’s concrete/conceptual ambiguity–is itself dependent on some external position from which this system is used as a tool. Derrida writes, “The machine does not run by itself. It is less a machine than a tool. And it is not held with only one hand. This is the mark of its temporality. Its maintenance is not simple” (“Freud” 226). Such substantialization is the reason that we can speak about the text itself as retaining “traces”–a play of language made substantial by the work of the deconstructive critic. This substantialized force makes no sense on its own. Instead, it points back–allegorically, in Ulmer’s sense–to linguistic conflicts, to the site in which they appear, and to the means by which it was constructed by an external interpreter. These three relays within a text are all held together by the worldly fluctuation between the concrete and the conceptual, by the problematic substantiality that reveals how this non-presence is given shape within a text and its analysis.

 

Such substantialized traces best summarize the tripartite structure of worldliness in Derrida’s theory, and most clearly suggest how we can define a relatively fixed system within the text. In the trace, the text’s self-presence gives way to an ongoing series of “worldly” deferrals and references. The space, the topos, of the text in which we discover these traces points back to its core play of linguistic différance. More important–and this is what critics have missed in claiming that Derrida does not address the issue of the “location” of deconstructive praxis–this topos and its dependence on textual conflicts also references an extra-textual, analytic position. It is for this reason that Derrida has stressed the non-arbitrary character of deconstructive criticism. This helps to make sense of Derrida’s often-cited description of deconstruction in Of Grammatology:

 

The movements of deconstruction do not destroy structures from the outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures. Inhabiting them in a certain way, because one always inhabits, and all the more when one does not suspect it. Operating necessarily from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of subversion from the old structure, borrowing them structurally, that is to say without being able to isolate their elements and atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain ways falls prey to its own work. (24)

 

Derrida’s description of the trace emphasizes not merely the function of contradiction and its spatial articulation in the text as a structure, but also the position that this space creates for a critic to “inhabit.” The trace, consequently, is not an arbitrary element of the text, but instead, by its problematic ontology, points back to a whole system of becoming-worldly in the text. Derrida particularly stresses the critic’s dependence on this interconnected system in the following description of deconstruction:

 

The incision of deconstruction, which is not a voluntary decision or an absolute beginning, does not take place just anywhere, or in an absolute elsewhere. An incision, precisely, it can be made only according to lines of force and forces of rupture that are localizable in the discourse to be deconstructed. The topical and technical determination of the most necessary sites and operators–beginnings, holds, levers, etc.–in a given situation depends upon an historical analysis. This analysis is made in the general movement of the field, and is never exhausted by the conscious calculation of a “subject.” (Positions 82)

 

Here, the position of an observer, the space of the text (its lines and forces), and the basic terms of the analysis are all mutually dependent and related in a system of worldly transformation. If Derrida refuses Weedon’s optimistic post-deconstructive model of self-conscious critics, he also refuses to locate textual play independently of a reader. Rather, language, space and reader are interconnected and function within a system of worldliness. Only by seeing the worldly as something in constant circulation and having multiple manifestations can we recognize the ontological complexity of Derridian space.

 

In this notion of the tripartite structure of the deconstructive text, Derrida suggests a clear similarity between deconstruction and the “located” criticism that is usually opposed to it. Both share a recognition of knowledge’s necessary position between text and world. Derrida understands that this worldly position is more than a matter of irony–that is, more than a simple fact that makes a text uncloseable and relativistic. Rather, he suggests that this textual worldliness leads to a specific structure for the dispersion of objectivity and the construction of “positions” of critical praxis. Derrida’s interest in how deconstruction is related to such positions is perhaps easiest to see in his recent writing on Marx. Derrida starts with the problematic figure of Marx himself, and with the difficulty of defining a notion of influence that does not presuppose a self-presence or simple causality:

 

Among all the temptations I will have to resist today, there would be the temptation of memory: to recount what was for me, and for those of my generation who shared it during a whole lifetime, the experience of Marxism, the quasi-paternal figure of Marx, the way it fought in us with other filiations, the reading of texts and the interpretation of a world in which the Marxist inheritance was–and still remains, and so will remain–absolutely and thoroughly determinate. (Specters 13-14)

 

Derrida’s means of escape from the “temptation of memory” and from a traditionalist explanation of deconstruction’s place in the world is to investigate the ontological ambiguities of the “specter” of Marx: “We believe that this messianic remains an ineffaceable mark–a mark one neither can nor should efface–of Marx’s legacy, and doubtless of inheriting, of the experience of inheritance in general. Otherwise, one would reduce the event-ness of the event, the singularity and the alterity of the other” (28). Derrida casts the “specter” of Marx as ontologically indeterminate, both concrete and conceptual, actual and ideal. It is this “specterality” that fascinates Derrida, both as a condition of Marx’s “presence” within intellectual debates today, and as an issue thematized by Marx. Indeed, when Derrida defines deconstruction as an extension of Marxism–“Deconstruction has never had any sense or interest, in my view at least, except as a radicalization, which is to say also in the tradition of a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism” (92)–he seems to have in mind just this shared concern for the “spectral” and how it complicates the self-presence of everyday objects. Derrida makes this connection between the specter and the concrete/conceptual ambiguity of différance directly. Discussing the difference between the specter and spirit, Derrida writes, “it is a differance. The specter is not only the carnal apparition of the spirit, its phenomenal body, its fallen and guilty body, it is also the impatient and nostalgic waiting for a redemption, namely, once again, for a spirit” (136). The tension that Derrida offers here between the ideal presence of the spirit and the physicality of the specter is just the tension that we have seen throughout between the conceptual and the concrete.⁵

 

Spatial Exchanges

 

Derrida has suggested that, although knowledge is not disinterested and objective, we can define a structure for critical investment and the organization of knowledge. Derrida’s theory of the tripartite structure of deconstructive praxis relies on the space of the site at its core. As his writing on Marx suggests, Derrida insists on describing the play of the concrete and the conceptual in spatial and temporal terms. Indeed, Derrida is quite explicit in stressing the role of spatial and temporal “location” in “spectral spiritualization”:

 

In the incoercible differance the here-now unfurls. Without lateness, without delay, but without presence, it is the precipitation of an absolute singularity, singular because differing, precisely, and always other, binding itself necessarily to the form of the instant, in imminence and in urgency.… No differance without alterity, no alterity without singularity, no singularity without here-now. (Specters 31)

 

Derrida’s articulation of the concrete/conceptual slippage functions according to a certain economy of space and time. Indeed, we can see the whole of the tripartite structure as a collection of several spaces. This is a structure that Probyn herself suggests in using the term “locale” for a specific site, and “location” for a more theoretical space: “By ‘location’ I refer to the methods by which one comes to locate sites of research. Through location knowledges are ordered into sequences which are congruent with previously established categories of knowledge” (178). If Probyn’s distinction between locale and location seems appropriate to Derrida, we should recognize in deconstruction the seed of a radical approach to an individual’s negotiation of textuality and socio-political involvement. Derrida offers us an image of criticism based on what I have called a “non-linear” space–a space that is constantly being constructed, that always gestures beyond itself, and that finally depends upon its continual transformation into other kinds of space.

 

The radical implications for criticism of this spatial multiplicity are never treated concretely by Derrida. Indeed, the kind of spatial multiplicity that I have described here initially seems merely to repeat the celebration of transience and indeterminacy that critics of postmodernism claim undermines the possibility of concrete political action.⁶ As I have noted above, this more complex notion of space has emerged in other forms of post-deconstructive criticism, without being integrated into the kind of textual analysis that we associated with deconstruction. Particularly helpful for recognizing how the positive connotations of deconstructive spatial multiplicity have been explored is Michel de Certeau’s writing on the negotiation of space in “everyday life.” In particular, de Certeau’s emphasis on social space speaks to the liberatory potential that exists unrecognized within totalizing systems without romanticizing fragmentation. De Certeau’s work on everyday life takes as its point of departure the premise that everyday actions are a tactical bricolage of “making due” that always works against traditional notions of power: “One deploys his forces, one does not take chances with feints. Power is bound by its very visibility. In contrast, trickery is possible for the weak” (37). De Certeau’s approach to everyday life is thus broadly in sympathy with local criticism’s interest in the positive political effect of occupying a critical “position” in a certain way. But de Certeau also echoes Derrida in treating such locations as constantly opening out into other forms of space. As a result, de Certeau uses the Derridian model of multiple interpretive spaces to address the questions of interpretive politics that give local criticism its impetus.

 

De Certeau’s liberatory criticism depends on complicating the social space upon which traditional images of social power and authority depend. When Foucault argued that modern society develops “a certain policy of the body, a certain way of rendering the group of men docile and useful” (Discipline 305) by locating individuals in isolated spaces where they could be observed and disciplined, he associated within contemporary thought strict spatial organization and the operation of power. De Certeau agrees that power operates by virtue of certain “proper places” that it defines, but he also explores social spaces that fall outside of proper disciplinary arrangement. Distinguishing the hegemonic “strategy” from the “tactics” of the weak, de Certeau writes, “strategies are actions which, thanks to the establishment of a place of power (the property of a proper), elaborate theoretical places (systems and totalizing discourses) capable of articulating an ensemble of physical places in which forces are distributed. They combine these three types of places and seek to master each by means of the others” (38). De Certeau contrasts fixed places to the practice of operating within space, a practice that by its nature undermines stability and the power that it supports. De Certeau’s focus is urban geography, where individuals use city spaces “tactically”: “the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers” (117). Such spatial practices are inherently temporal. De Certeau is worth quoting at some length:

 

At the outset, I shall make a distinction between space (espace) and place (lieu) that delimits a field. A place (lieu) is the order (of whatever kind) in accord with which elements are distributed in relationships of coexistence. It thus excludes the possibility of two things being in the same location (place). The law of the “proper” rules in the place: the elements taken into consideration are beside one another, each situated in its own “proper” and distinct location, a location it defines. A place is thus an instantaneous configuration of positions. It implies an indication of stability.

 

A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile elements. It is in a sense articulated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it. Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual programs or contractual proximities…. In contradistinction to the place, it has thus none of the univocity or stability of a “proper.”

 

In short, space is a practiced place. (117)

 

De Certeau distinguishes between a defined place (lieu) and a more general and abstract space produced by “proper” places’ confrontation of time. De Certeau imagines that one’s everyday actions cut across places, introducing a temporality and bringing many spaces into contact. This idea of spatial practice at first seems to echo the later writings of Foucault, whose emphasis on individual practices has seemed to many critics to be a productive alternative to the image of panoptical power in works like Discipline and Punish.⁷ But rather than treating practice as an alternative to disciplinary spaces, de Certeau follows Derrida and explores how practice creates many spaces.⁸ Specifically, de Certeau concludes rather surprisingly that undermining place reveals a more abstract space. This is, of course, just the opposite of what we would expect, since we usually think that it is the “concrete” that has the potential to undermine discourse and representation. Like Derrida, de Certeau refuses to posit some fundamental concrete “thing” that troubles concepts or abstract spaces. But he also refuses to relativize all spaces, or to suggest that we simply move tactically between an unending string of specific places. Instead, according to de Certeau, we get a glimpse of an abstract space that “occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it.” De Certeau is suggesting that the shifts between spaces are freeing precisely because they allow us to recognize a broader notion of space that overarches individual places. Against calls for localization, de Certeau suggests that attention to “sites” is valuable only because of the crossing of boundaries that they necessitate, crossings that allow us to glimpse a more abstract notion of space.

 

The abstract space that de Certeau describes draws our attention to the reader’s active involvement in the construction of objects of knowledge–just as in Derrida’s writing the textual site points back to the critical location which “maintains” it. De Certeau makes clear that this abstract space cannot be inhabited in any permanent way; rather, the importance of this abstract space is that it makes possible a certain kind of action, a practice. When we recognize a space that overarches individual places, we grasp our ability to act in ways not predetermined by those places and the power relations that they support. One form of spatial practice is narrative: “every day, [stories] traverse and organize places; they select and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them. They are spatial trajectories” (115). For de Certeau, narrative is at work within the movement between “proper places” of any sort–including the discursive topoi that legitimate scientific knowledge. De Certeau writes, “the folktale provides scientific discourse with a model, and not merely with textual objects to be dealt with. It no longer has the status of a document that does not know what it says, cited (summoned and quoted) before and by the analysis that knows it. On the contrary, it is a know-how-to-say exactly adjusted to its object” (78). Narrative in this sense is always the practice of discourse, a practice that sets into play the movement between proper places. When we understand the abstract space that de Certeau suggests, we recognize our own role within the construction of objects of knowledge. And once we recognize this role and the larger space upon which it depends, de Certeau suggests, we can begin to formulate new trajectories for critical analysis. Thus, quite against local criticism’s suspicions of theory, de Certeau argues that only through a kind of epiphany-like glimpse into abstract space can critics move beyond the political locations from which they initially approach their object of study. If de Certeau is right, then critics’ willingness to participate in the dialectic of location and textual “site” is precisely what allows interpretation to spin off into new directions. Indeed, we will recall Derrida’s insistence in “Ousia and Gramme” that the point always gestures towards the whole movement of the line. The nexus between critical location and textual site thus resembles the confused space of the city, where many paths overlap and new trajectories constantly appear.

 

De Certeau provides a way of recognizing the practical implications of the spatial multiplicity that Derrida describes. Both thinkers offer a radical alternative to the view that a critical “location” should be defined, stable, and distinct. By turning to a “non-linear” model of space based on the transformation of interpretive site into critical location, these theories develop a richer model of interpretation that, more importantly, emphasizes the moment when critics glimpse a new way to follow out the transformation of interpretive spaces and interpret texts differently. In contrast to the more concrete and perhaps more accessible spatial models that we see in de Certeau and in Laclau and Mouffe, I have argued that Derrida offers us something unique and essential by linking these spaces to the analysis of textual slippages. Derrida points toward a genuinely post-deconstructive method of textual analysis–one that does not simply, begrudgingly accept traditional metanarratives, but instead balances critical location and textual analysis through a dynamic, non-linear site of analysis.

Notes

 

1. A high point of this debate was the winter 1985 issue of Diacritics (15.4) devoted to “Marx after Derrida.” For a recent reevaluation of the debate over the politics of deconstruction, see Paul Jay, “Bridging the Gap.”

 

2. On the importance of such spatial language, see Kathleen M. Kirby, “Thinking through the Boundary.”

 

3. This reading of Derrida is often predicated on his well-known comment that “there is nothing outside of the text.” For a reconsideration of the idea of exteriority in this comment, see Jeffrey T. Nealon, Double Reading (57).

 

4. There are times, however, when Laclau and Mouffe actually sound a great deal like Derrida in discussing the production of this space. In “Politics and the Limits of Modernity,” Laclau turns to the notion of a “horizon” in contrast to the metanarrative “foundation” problematized by postmodernist discourse. Although this essay treats the concept in far less detail, we might see similarities between the gramme and this horizon as a site of analysis temporarily produced by reference to a limit that shapes it.

 

5. Indeed, at one point in Specters, Derrida mentions “Ousia and Gramme” as an essay that examines the temporality of “spectralizing” and the creation of the “‘non-sensuous’ thing” (155).

 

6. See, for example, John McGowan’s Habermassian critique of the doctrine of “negative freedom” in poststructural thought in Postmodernism and Its Critics.

 

7. In The Use of Pleasure, for example, Foucault describes how individuals participate in discursive structures to “transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria” (10-11). This image of individuals participating within the construction of being has offered many critics an alternative to Foucault’s earlier theory of power’s “inscription” of individual bodies.

 

8. Actually, one might argue that the same is true of Foucault’s later work. Gilles Deleuze argues that Foucault’s idea of space undergoes a fundamental change: “For a long time Foucault thought of the outside as being an ultimate spatiality that was deeper than time; but in his late works he offers the possibility once more of putting time on the outside as being time, conditioned by the fold” (108). Deleuze’s theory of the “folding” of space in Foucault’s last work echoes the spatial multiplicity that I have described in Derrida.

 

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