Robert S. Oventile

English and Foreign Languages Division
Pasadena City College
rsoventile@paccd.cc.ca.us

 

Review of: Tom Cohen, et al., eds., Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory.Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2001.

 

As we confront the triumph of USA-centrism (“institutionalize diversity locally, maximize profit globally”), to trace our historicity, defined by punctual “material events,” we need to contest what Paul de Man calls “aesthetic ideology.” So argues Material Events, co-edited by Tom Cohen, Barbara Cohen, J. Hillis Miller, and Andrzej Warminski. Material Events includes path-breaking essays that examine Cézanne’s paintings, Hitchcock’s films, and Descarte’s notions about the body. With contributions by Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Arkady Plotnitsky, and Barbara Johnson, this volume is one of the most important responses to Paul de Man’s work, especially the posthumous Aesthetic Ideology, yet published.¹

 

Material Events will upset academics skeptical of “theory” in general and of “deconstruction” in particular (however, this collection reminds us why “theory” is not the best term to define “deconstruction”). But Material Events, which examines the relevance of de Man’s arguments to psychoanalysis, political science, and law, should not only irritate academics impatient to conserve traditions and the boundaries between them. Many, but not all, instructors and researchers who want to be effectively progressive may be disturbed by the editors’ claim that aesthetic ideology dominates the contemporary university.

 

de Man’s study of aesthetic ideology interrogates a key procedure of higher education: the aestheticization of singularities to render them as knowable, exchangeable representatives. In this regard, the university’s pursuit of knowledge may truly participate in an exercise of Eurocentric, now actually USA-centric, power. Indeed, the example of “diversity” helps to define the import of Material Events. de Man did not address what the university now calls “multiculturalism.” But this term specifies the stakes of de Man’s last essays, especially as explicated by and expanded upon in this new collection: textual “material events” breach the aesthetic erasures of otherness that contemporary academic institutions (and their governmental and transnational corporate sponsors) thrive on while asserting their commitment to “diversity.”

 

The university’s academic mission is a cognitive one: to gain rational knowledge and to teach that knowledge to students. This mission cannot avoid being political, and thus ideological, especially when the university attempts to know the “diverse.” By aestheticizing “diversity” to institutionalize a knowledge of “cultures,” the university may be perpetuating rather than contesting one of higher education’s most longstanding and pronouncedly ideological projects: that of managing or containing socioeconomic conflicts by instituting “culture” as a function of what Friedrich Schiller called “aesthetic education.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s On the Constitution of the Church and State articulated the version of this project that was taken up by John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold.²

 

Material Events suggests that a claim de Man made in 1983 is now even more valid: “the standards… and the values by means of which we teach… are more than ever and profoundly Schillerian” (Aesthetic 142). In the sentences about “diversity” that colleges and universities include in their mission statements, one often finds an unintentional paraphrase of Schiller, Coleridge, Mill, and/or Arnold on the relations between culture, education, and the state. The likelihood, de Man might argue, that such documents’ authors have never read Schiller or Coleridge on the relations between the aesthetic and the workings of state power only underlines the pervasiveness of aesthetic ideology.

 

At issue is such ideology’s impact on various studies. Material Events asks: Can de Man’s work on the aesthetic help academics focused on feminist, ethnic, cultural, or literary studies to contest ideology and to access the materiality of history? Can de Man aid us in becoming better readers of Marx, Gramsci, or Althusser? The contributions relevant to this last question are those by J. Hillis Miller, Ernesto Laclau, Michael Sprinker, and Andrzej Warminski. Though de Man has often been regraded as a figure of the right, and even his defenders have not claimed a place for him in the Western Marxist tradition, Miller argues that “a deep kinship exists between de Man’s work and Marx’s thought in The German Ideology” (186). Laclau discusses de Man on tropes to examine the political strategies of hegemony. Sprinker explores the parallels and disjunctions between de Man and Althusser on ideology. Warminski elaborates de Man’s definition of “material events” to suggest how de Man’s analysis of aesthetic ideology “is ‘truer’ to Marx’s own procedures” than most contemporary attempts at ideology critique (22).

 

According to Miller’s “Paul de Man as Allergen,” academia is allergic to de Man’s arguments about materiality because they dispute “basic ideological assumptions” that both academics and the university itself “need to get on with [their] work” (185). The university needs to assume (1) that what it engages is available as a presence or a phenomenon that academic discourses can re-present and so know, and (2) that such engagement is politically neutral. For de Man, these assumptions involve a reaction, Miller says an allergic one, to a radically nonphenomenal materiality by which alterity impinges on the university while evading the university’s cognitive grasp. Such materiality affects thought yet exceeds any representation thought posits.

 

The crux of Material Events is de Man’s differentiation between the phenomenality of phenomena known, the artifact of a cognitive system of tropes that induces reference’s aberrant confusion with phenomenalism, and (the) materiality (of inscription). Miller explains that for de Man, outrageously enough, materiality is nothing phenomenal: no intuition of materiality is possible (yet materiality is seen–more on this below). de Man’s precisely “counterintuitive concept” of materiality, writes Miller, “is not really a concept” (185). Materiality does not defeat intuition in Platonic fashion, by being an idea inaccessible to the senses. For Platonism, ideas facilitate intuition by ordering the sensible into intelligibility. Any given sensible table is intelligible as such because it participates in the non-sensible idea “table.” Traditionally, matters of knowledge are phenomenal. Neither Platonically sensible nor intelligible, materiality is irreducible to a matter of knowledge. Plotnitsky argues that, for de Man, the term “materiality” refers to a singularity that utterly evades all theorization, rule making, or “classical” knowledge production.

 

Materiality’s nonphenomenality relates to a potently allergenic de Manean definition: “What we call ideology is precisely the confusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism” (de Man, Resistance 11). In aesthetic ideology, what is called a referent’s phenomenality is an artifact of the apparatus that apprehends and equates a given referent with another to produce a set of what are then cognized as mutually substitutable entities, whether the apparatus is an anthropological survey or a formula in geometry. Knowledge production depends on such aestheticization: the equation of singularities as substitutable phenomena that may be conceived of as identical. Where such aestheticization, the pursuit of knowledge, and the reproduction of institutions converge, ideology exists.

 

Are we awash in aesthetic ideology? Say that, to track the institutionalization of “diversity,” a United States university or college gathers statistics numerically defining professors as falling into various categories. To produce this knowledge, the university or college must equate and so homogenize, that is, aestheticize, singularities: one person plus another equals two who fall into this or that category only when we know both as mutually substitutable phenomena. So, for example, we may view Japanese Americans as interchangeable when we confuse a reference for a phenomenal intuition: “When I see Professors Y and Z, I am seeing two interchangeable examples of an identical phenomenon.” The interchangeability, confused for an instance of phenomenalism, is actually an artifact of language’s referential function, here a certain language of “diversity” that refers to one person as substituting for (as re-presenting) another. Resorting to this language, we gain important knowledge: How many Japanese Americans has the institution hired? But this language’s referential artifact, confused for a phenomenon, yields an aesthetic ideology that fashions peoples by whitening out singular traces of alterity among people. This whitening out is a kind of violence.

 

Material Events confronts the complex, sometimes grave, consequences of knowledge production’s inseparability from ideology. By instituting the substitution of whole (nation, culture, gender, ethnicity) and part (member), aestheticization posits the homogenizing idea that a nation’s, culture’s, gender’s, or ethnicity’s members represent each other. The dependence of this idea, and so of the knowledge organized by it, on a trope, in this case synecdoche, defines what de Man calls “tropological system[s] of cognition” (Aesthetic 133). But the aestheticization that yields this idea also structures and produces the ideology that facilitates prejudices: “Those _____, they are all alike; they all _____.” Fill in the blanks as your prejudice dictates: aesthetic ideology structures racism, but also anti-Semitism, sexism, and homophobia. The prejudices that aesthetic ideology houses depend on the aberrant confusion of referentiality with phenomenality even when the “phenomenon” in question is a moral abstraction: “When you look at _____, you see evil; when you look at _____, you see good.” Prejudice’s template, aesthetic ideology, results not only in what multiculturalists call “stereotypes,” but also in acts of violence.

 

Defining the singular other we are about to encounter as a representative _____, we exercise knowledge that is tied to aestheticization. Simultaneously, our thoughts and actions may be enclosed by an ideology that can control our relations with him or her. The knowledge and the ideology can reinforce each other to the point where little distinction remains. The violence that is and results from racial profiling in police work exemplifies this dynamic. Here the definition of the “typical” criminal’s “profile” virtually merges with an ideology, in this case racial ideology. And ideology can facilitate racist violence in subtler ways. “Ideology is always mimetic ideology,” and Material Events suggests that aesthetic ideology currently pervades various mise en scènes of representation (xii). Think of the staging of singular others as “representative” members of ethnic or “racial” minorities at last summer’s Republican and Democratic national conventions, and remember that both parties diligently pursue policies that are quite detrimental to and violent toward those referred to as working-class Latinos and African Americans. Some of these policies violently enact racist inequality. The “war on drugs,” which fuels racial profiling and results in dramatic racist inequalities in arrest and incarceration rates, is an example.

 

But, de Man reminds us, “the political power of the aesthetic, the measure of its impact on reality, necessarily travels by ways of its didactic manifestations. The politics of the aesthetic state are the politics of education” (Rhetoric 273). Pursuing “diversity,” higher education would institutionalize literature as cultures’ aesthetic representation. Many educators teach literature to help students know themselves and others as representatives of cultures or groups, which are thus assumed merely to be presences available to consciousness for representation. The related assumption is that reading a literary work yields cognition of a representative _____ that allows students to know themselves and others as such _____. Again, literature professors inherit these assumptions about pedagogy from influential eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts of how aesthetic education helps the liberal state to smooth over socioeconomic conflicts. Perhaps especially in what we still call “English” or “Literature” departments, these assumptions lead professors and students, however radical their intentions, to reinforce ideologies that tend to reproduce existing relations of production.

 

Material Events leads us to ask whether contemporary modes of research and pedagogy remain captured by aesthetic ideology and so are finally unable effectively to contest, for example, racism, sexism, or homophobia. In the collection’s introduction, “A ‘Materiality without Matter’?,” the editors’ most uncompromising concern emerges: contemporary “aesthetic education” may assist the very injustices academics and their institutions often claim to resist: “The strategies of historicism, of identity politics, or cultural studies” too often participate in an ideological “relapse” by imposing “a model of reference… upon the same conceptual space whose impulse is to fabricate an organizing ground or immediacy (the subject, experience, history) that effaces the problematic of inscription” (xi).

 

The editors argue that in the contemporary academy, but also more generally, we find in place “an aesthetico-political regime, an occlusion of the order of inscription… in favor of tropes guarding the claims of human immediacy and perception” (xii). This emphasis on higher education as ideology’s site of reproduction certainly accords with Althusser’s claim that, while the church was feudalism’s central “ideological state apparatus,” the dominant ideological state apparatus “in mature capitalist social formations… is the educational ideological apparatus” (152). Miller and Sprinker assert that de Man’s claims about aesthetic ideology parallel Althusser’s statement that “Ideology is a ‘Representation’ of the Imaginary Relationship of Individuals to their Real Conditions of Existence” (162).

 

But Sprinker finds de Man somewhat Stalinist: de Man’s “strict insistence on historical necessity, on, as it were, the iron laws of the dialectic (to translate de Manian strictures into a familiar idiom), is anything but Marxist” (42). Sprinker judges that, for de Man, history “is governed by structures as invariant and ineluctable as those that command linguistic tropes” (41). Both Plotnitsky and Miller reject this characterization, arguing that de Manean material events are unknowable, especially in terms of “iron laws.” In contrast to Sprinker, who finds de Man to associate historicity with tropes, Miller writes that, for de Man, “the materiality of history, properly speaking, is the result of acts of power that are punctual and momentary, since they are atemporal, noncognitive and noncognizable performative utterances” (188).

 

So how does de Man link tropes, material events, and performatives? Are tropes or are performatives material events? As Miller specifies, de Man argues that history, as a material event, occurs in the “shift from cognitive to efficaciously performative discourse” (188). Here a quote from the transcription of de Man’s lecture “Kant and Schiller” is in order:

 

The linguistic model for [the material event is not]… the performative in itself–because the performative in itself exists independently of tropes and exists independently of a critical examination or of an epistemological examination of tropes–but the transition, the passage from a conception of language as a [cognitive tropological] system… to another conception of language in which language is no longer cognitive but in which language is performative. (Aesthetic 132)

 

In “‘As the poets do it’: On the Material Sublime,” Warminski cites the above sentences to sanction his counsel against a “misreading of de Man” that results in “a certain inflation and overvaluation of the performative” (25). The material event is neither a cognitive trope nor a performative utterance but the passage from one to the other. The passage from trope to performative “occurs always, and can only occur, by ways of an epistemological critique of trope” (de Man, Aesthetic 133). Lenin, but possibly not Althusser, might have balked at taking the “epistemological critique of trope” as an answer to the question: What is to be done? Yet Material Events implies that racist, sexist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic instances of aesthetic ideology may be best resisted by means of just such a “critical-linguistic analysis” (de Man, Resistance 121).

 

However, Warminski cautions us, this “critical-linguistic analysis” should not be mistaken for, to use de Man’s phrase, “what generally passes as ‘critique of ideology'” (de Man, Resistance 121). Pedagogies that would “demystify” or “unmask” stereotypes by uncovering what the stereotyped really are like “substitute one trope for another” and are thus condemned “to remain very much within (and hence to confirm) the tropological system” they aim to criticize (Warminski, “Allegories” 11).

 

Warminski is not suggesting that we are unable to develop better knowledge. The argument is that, say, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, if it contests ideology, does so not primarily by giving readers better knowledge, a more or “politically” correct re-presentation, but by enacting a passage from a cognitive to a performative discourse. A material event, this passage would disarticulate tropological systems that, referring to African Americans, posit an object of knowledge (“race”) and an ideology (“racism”).

 

de Man argues that a crucial instance of disarticulation marks Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Any reader who has struggled with de Man’s crucial essay in Aesthetic Ideology, “Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant,” will welcome Warminski’s essay on the “material” sublime. Warminski patiently explicates de Man’s complex argument that the Kantian sublime’s moments are structured by linguistic principles. The transition from the tropological system Kant calls the “mathematical” sublime to the performative Kant calls the “dynamic” sublime happens by way of a “material” sublime. de Man reads this “material” sublime in Kant’s description of an ocean vaulted by sky. de Man states that in this scene “no mind is involved…. This vision is purely material, devoid of any reflexive or intellectual complication[;] it is also purely formal, devoid of any semantic depth” (Aesthetic 82-3). This “material vision” is nonphenomenal in part because no intentional structure of consciousness is at work. In Althusserian terms, the “material” sublime countenances no interpellative effects. And this vision allegorizes the materiality of language unavailable to phenomenalization. Finally, the “material sublime” is an event that constitutes a “deep, perhaps fatal, break or discontinuity” in Kant’s project to articulate “transcendental” with “metaphysical” principles, or, in de Man’s terms, the “critical” with the “ideological” (Aesthetic 79, 70-73). For de Man, Warminski explains, this break disarticulates the “critical [Kantian] philosophy itself” while being a result of that philosophy’s very rigor (17).

 

For all de Man’s focus on Kant, we would be mistaken if we were to think that “material events” are merely occurrences in “intellectual” or “literary” history. Miller dispels this misunderstanding. The shift from cognitive to performative language in Kant’s Critique of Judgment is a material event. de Man finds Schiller’s reception of that text to attempt a recuperation of that event “by reinscribing it in the cognition of tropes,” and he argues that this “is itself a tropological, cognitive, and not a historical move” (Aesthetic 134). But (historians prepare to be irritated), for de Man, the disarticulation that the Critique of Judgment enacts should be thought of as a historical event, much as we might think of the storming of the Bastille as a historical event. In de Man’s terms, the storming of the Bastille itself resulted from a “prior” historical event. In Paris on 14 July 1789 the cry “To the Bastille!” was a felicitous speech act, but that performative was not in itself the precipitating historical event. The material event was a kind of shift or transition–a radically nontemporal, nonspatial, nonphenomenal passage–by means of which that performative emerged from the disarticulation of a system of tropes that posited feudal ideology.

 

Aestheticization ties knowledge to ideology. But, attempting to know an unknowable materiality, we dismantle knowledge’s authority. In discussing de Man’s “authority without authority,” Miller writes:

 

This authority… undoes all grounds for speaking with authority. How can one speak intelligibly on the grounds of the unintelligible? At the limit, and indeed all along the way, de Man’s writings are allergenic because they pass on to the reader an allergen, an otherness, with which they have been infected and that is quite other to the calm, implacable, rational, maddeningly difficult to refute, rigor of de Man’s argumentation. Or rather, the latter turns out to be the same as the former, reason to be other to itself. (200-201)

 

When we find “reason to be other to itself,” we may be able, not to escape, but to resist “the reproduction… of aesthetic ideology” (183). This is one of many lessons Material Events teaches, and they are worth learning.

 

Notes

 

1. See also: Jacques Derrida, Memoires for Paul de Man, trans. Cecile Lindsay, et al., rev. ed. (New York: Columbia UP, 1989); Rodolphe Gasché, The Wild Card of Reading: On Paul de Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998); Christopher Norris, Paul de Man: Deconstruction and the Critique of Aesthetic Ideology (New York: Routledge, 1988); and Lindsay Waters and Wlad Godzich, eds., Reading de Man Reading (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989).

 

2. See David Lloyd and Paul Thomas, Culture and the State (New York: Routledge, 1998).

Works Cited

 

• Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review, 1971.
• de Man, Paul. Aesthetic Ideology. Ed. Andrzej Warminski. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996.
• —. The Resistance to Theory. Fwd. Wlad Godzich. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.
• —. The Rhetoric of Romanticism. New York: Columbia UP, 1984.
• Warminski, Andrzej. “Allegories of Reference.” Introduction. Aesthetic Ideology. By Paul de Man. Ed. Andrzej Warminski. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. 1-33.