W.J.T. Mitchell
          and the Ideology of Pluralism
         The criterion of "arguability" has tended to steer 
            away from the kind of pluralism which defines itself as neutral,
            tolerant eclecticism toward a position which I would call
            "dialectical pluralism." This sort of pluralism is not content with
            mere diversity but insists on pushing divergent theories and
            practices toward confrontation and dialogue. Its aim is not the
            mere preservation or proliferation of variety but the weeding out
            of error, the elimination of trivial or marginal contentions, and
            the clarification of fundamental and irreducible differences. The
            goal of dialectical pluralism is not liberal toleration of opposing
            views from a neutral ground but transformation, conversion, or, at
            least, the kind of communication which clarifies exactly what is at
            stake in any critical conflict. A good dramatization of Critical
            Inquiry's editorial ideal would be the dialogue of the devil and
            angel in Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell, an exchange in which
            each contestant enters into and criticizes the metaphysics of his
            contrary and which ends happily with the angel transformed into a
            devil.
             
Michael Fried
         Painter into Painting: On Courbet's After Dinner at_Ornansand
            Stonebreakers
         In the pages that follow I looked closely at two major paintings by
            Gustave Courbet (1819-77): the After Dinner at Ornans, perhaps
            begun in the small town of the title (the artist's birthplace) but
            certainly completed in Paris during the winter of 1848-49; and the
            Stonebreakers, painted wholly in Ornans just under a year later.
            The After Dinner and the Stonebreakers are the first in a series of
            large multifigure compositions--others are the Burial at Ornans
            (1949-50) and the Peasants of Flagey Returning from the Fair
            (1850) that mark not only Courbet's maturity as an artist but
            his emergence as a disruptive force, almost a one-man wrecking
            crew, in the cultural politics of his time. They are also those
            works in which his self-declared identity as a Realist first
            becomes manifest, and probably the chief concern of the most
            interesting recent scholarship on Courbet has been to try to decode
            that epithet in social-historical terms, or at any rate to situate
            his activity as a painter during the years 1848-55 in the context
            of the social and political struggles that accompanied the creation
            of the Second Republic and its subversion by Louis Bonaparte.2 At
            the core of that tradition, motivating and, as it were, mobilizing
            it, is the demand that the painter succeed in placing in abeyance
            the primordial convention that paintings are made to be
            beheld that he contrive in one way or another to establish
            the fiction, the meta-illusion, that the beholder does not exist,
            that there is no one standing before the picture. From Greuze
            through Gèricault, this was chiefly to be accomplished in and
            through the medium of visual drama, that is, by representing
            figures so deeply absorbed in their actions, emotions, and states
            of mind and furthermore so efficaciously bound together in a single
            comprehensive dramatic situation that they would strike one as
            absolutely immured in the world of the painting and a fortiori as
            oblivious to the very possibility of being viewed. And one way of
            describing the crisis that I believe overtook French painting (or
            this tradition) by the 1820s and '30s is to say that the dramatic
            as such came more and more to be revealed as inescapably
            theatrical that the array of conventions that once had served
            to establish the meta-illusion of the beholder's nonexistence now
            seemed merely to attest to his controlling presence.
            1. The present essay is adapted from a book-length study, in
            progress, of Courbet's art. Recent books and articles emphasizing
            social and political considerations include Linda Nochlin, Gustave
            Courbet: A Study of Style and Society (Ph.D. diss., New York
            University, 1963; rpt. New York, 1976); T.J. Clark, "A Bourgeois
            Dance of Death: Max Buchon on Courbet," Burlington Magazine 111
            (April-May 1969): 208-12, 282-89, and Image of the People: Gustave
            Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848-51 (Greenwich, Conn.,
            1973); Jack LIndsay, Gustave Courbet: His Life and Art (New York,
            1973); Klaus Herding, ed., Realismus als Widerspruch: Die
            Wirklichkeit in Courbets Malerei (Frankfurt am Main, 1978);
            Herding, "Les Lutteurs 'détestables': Critique de style, critique
            sociale," Histoire et critique de l'art 4-5 (1978): 94-122; and
            James Henry Rubin, Realism and Social Vision in Courbet and
            Proudhon (Princeton, N.J., 1980).
            2. For an account of the early evolution of that tradition, see my
            Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of
            Diderot (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980), as well as the essays on
            Courbet cited in n. 3.
            Michael Fried, professor of humanities and the history of art at
            the Johns Hopkins University, is the author of Morris Louis and
            Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of
            Diderot. He is currently at work on a book on Courbet.
Robert L. Carringer
         Orson Welles and Gregg Toland: Their Collaboration on_Citizen_Kane
         Though he has worked almost exclusively in collaborative mediums
            like radio and film, Orson Welles has always tended to think of
            himself as an individual author. "Any production in any medium is a
            one-man production," he said to me. On the question of sharing
            creative responsibility for the works that bear his name, he is
            deeply ambivalent. His insistence on multiple billings for himself
            is legendary. As I can well testify, the very mention of the term
            collaboration at a wrong moment can be enough to send him into a
            rage. The controversy over who scripted Citizen Kaneinitiated by
            Pauline Kael hurt him very deeply. That the wound still festers to
            this day is evident in the rancor with which he speaks of former
            associates like John Houseman. Yet in quieter moments he will fully
            concede how indispensable his principal collaborators have been to
            him and will openly discuss the nature and extent of their
            contributions. He is especially full of praise for cinematographers
            with whom he has worked over the years, such as Gregg Toland,
            Russell Metty, and, more recently, Gary Graver. On Citizen Kane,he
            singles out four individuals whom he thinks deserve special
            recognition: writer Herman Mankiewicz, art director Perry Ferguson,
            composer Bernard Herrmann, and Toland. Of these, he says, Toland's
            contribution to the film was the greatest, second in importance
            only to his own. In this essay I deal with the history and nature
            of Welles' collaboration with Toland on Citizen Kane what
            brought them together, their working relationship, and the
            characteristics and rationale of the visual plan they created for
            the film. As we shall see, Toland brought a largely pre-conceived
            visual plan to Citizen Kanewhich he had been working out in his
            previous films. Welles accepted Toland's plan so readily because he
            recognized how dramatically appropriate it was to the story
            material. Toland's cinematography for Citizen Kanealso left a major
            legacy to Hollywood films of the 1940s.
            Robert L. Carringer, is associate professor of English and cinema
            studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This
            essay is excerpted from his book in progress, The Road through
            Xanadu. His most recent contribution to was "The
            Scripts of Citizen Kane" (Winter 1978).
Jacques Derrida
         The Linguistic Circle of Geneva
         Linguists are becoming more and more interested in the genealogy of
            linguistics. And in reconstituting the history or prehistory of
            their science, they are discovering numerous ancestors, sometimes
            with a certain astonished recognition. Interest in the origin of
            linguistics is awakened when the problems of the origin of language
            cease to be proscribed (as they had been from the end of the
            nineteenth century) and when a certain geneticism or a
            certain generativism comes back into its own. One could show
            that this is not a chance encounter. This historical activity is no
            longer elaborated solely at the margins of scientific practice, and
            its results are already being felt. In particular, we are no longer
            at the stage of the prejudice according to which linguistics as a
            science was born of a single "epistemological break" a
            concept, called Bachelardian, much used or abused today and
            of a break occurring in our immediate vicinity. We no longer think,
            as does Maurice Grammont, that "everything prior to the nineteenth
            century, which is not yet linguistics, can be expedited in several
            lines."1 Noam Chomsky, in an article announcing his Cartesian
            Linguistics,which presents in its major lines the concept of
            "generative grammar," states: "My aim here is not to justify the
            interest of this investigation, nor to describe summarily its
            procedure, but instead to underline that by a curious detour it
            takes us back to a tradition of ancient thought, rather than
            constituting a new departure or a radical innovation in the domain
            of linguistics and psychology."2
            If we are to set ourselves down in the space of this "curious
            detour," we could not help encountering the "linguistics" of Jean-
            Jacques Rousseau. We would have to ask ourselves, then, in what
            ways Rousseau's reflections on the sign, on language, on the origin
            of languages, on the relations between speech and writing, and so
            on announce (but what does "announce" mean here?) what we are so
            often tempted to consider as the very modernity of linguistic
            science, that is, modernity aslinguistic science, since so many
            other "human sciences" refer to linguistics as their particular
            model. And we are all the more encouraged to practice this detour
            in that Chomsky's major references, in Cartesian Linguistics,are to
            the Logi cand General and Reasoned Grammarof Port-Royal, works that
            Rousseau knew well and held in high esteem.3 For example, on
            several occasions Rousseau cites Duclos' commentary on the General
            and Reasoned Grammar. The Essay on the Origin of Languageseven
            closes with one of these citations. Thus Rousseau acknowledges his
            debt.
            1. Maurice Grammont, cited by Noam Chomsky, Cartesian Linguistics
            (New York, 1966), p. 1.
            2. Chomsky, "De quelques constantes de la théory linguistique,"
            Diogène, no. 51 (1965); my italics. See also Chomsky, Current
            Issues in Linguistic Theory (The Hague, 1964), p.15 ff. There is an
            analogous gesture in Jakobson, who refers not only to Peirce and,
            as does Chomsky, to Humboldt but also to John of Salisbury, to the
            Stoics, and to Plato's Cratylus: see Jakobson, "A la recherche de
            l'essence du langage," Diogène, no. 51 (1965).
            3. "I began with some book of philosophy, like the Port-Royal
            Logic, Locke's Essay, Malebranch, Leibniz, Descartes, etc." (Jean-
            Jacques Rousseau, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 1, Confessions [Paris,
            1959], p. 237).
            Jacques Derrida, professor of the history of philosophy at the
            Ècole Normale Supérieure in Paris, is the author of, among other
            works, Writing and Difference, Of Grammatology,and Marges de la
            philosophie,from which the present essay is taken. His previous
            contribution to ,"The Law of Genre," appeared in
            the Autumn 1980 issue. Alan Bass, a psychoanalyst, has published
            essays on deconstruction and psychoanalytic theory and practice.
Stanley E. Fish
         With the Compliments of the Author: Reflections on_Austin_and
            Derrida
         In the summer of 1977, as I was preparing to teach Jacques
            Derrida's Of Grammatology to a class at the School of
            Criticism and Theory in Irvine, a card floated out of the text and
            presented itself for interpretation. It read:
                            WITH THE COMPLIMENTS OF THE AUTHOR
            Immediately I was faced with an interpretive problem not only in
            the ordinary and everyday sense of having to determine the meaning
            and the intention (they are the same thing) of the utterance but in
            the special sense (or so it might seem) occasioned by the fact that
            I didn't know who the author named or, rather, not named by
            the card was. It might have been Derrida himself whom I had met,
            but only in passing. Or it might have been Derrida's
            translator, Gayatri Spivak whom I had known for some time and who
            might well have put me on the publisher's list. Or it might
            have been the publisher, in this case the Johns Hopkins University
            Press of whose editorial board I was then a member. In the absence
            (a key word) of any explicit identification, I found myself a very
            emblem of the difficulties or infelicities that attend distanced or
            etiolated communication: unable to proceed because the words were
            cut off from their anchoring source in a unique and clearly present
            intention. That is to say, I seemed, in the very moment of my
            perplexity, to be proving on my pulse the superiority of face-to-
            face communication, where one can know intentions directly, to
            communication mediated by the marks of writing and in this case by
            a writing that materialized without any clues as to its context of
            origin. It may not have been a message found in a bottle, but it
            certainly was a message found in a book.
Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels
         Against Theory
         By "theory" we mean a special project in literary criticism: the
            attempt to govern interpretations of particular texts by appealing
            to an account of interpretation in general. The term is sometimes
            applied to literary subjects with no direct bearing on the
            interpretation of individual works, such as narratology,
            stylistics, and prosody. Despite their generality, however, these
            subjects seem to us essentially empirical, and our argument against
            theory will not apply to them.
            Contemporary theory has taken two forms. Some theorists have sought
            to ground the reading of literary texts in methods designed to
            guarantee the objectivity and validity of interpretations. Others,
            impressed by the inability of such procedures to produce agreement
            among interpreters, have translated that failure into an
            alternative mode of theory that denies the possibility of correct
            interpretation. Our aim here is not to choose between these two
            alternatives but rather to show that both rest on a single mistake,
            a mistake that is central to the notion of theory per se. The
            object of our critique is not a particular way of doing theory but
            the idea of doing theory at all.
            Theory attempts to solve or to celebrate the impossibility of
            solving a set of familiar problems: the function of authorial
            intention, the status of literary language, the role of
            interpretive assumptions, and so on. We will not attempt to solve
            these problems, nor will we be concerned with tracing their history
            or surveying the range of arguments they have stimulated. In our
            view, the mistake on which all critical theory rests has been to
            imagine that these problems are real. In fact, we will claim such
            problems only seem real--and theory itself only seems possible or
            relevant when theorists fail to recognize the fundamental
            inseparability of the elements involved.
            The clearest example of the tendency to generate theoretical
            problems by splitting apart terms that are in fact inseparable is
            the persistent debate over the relation between authorial intention
            and the meaning texts. Some theorists have claimed that valid
            interpretations can only be obtained through an appeal to authorial
            intentions. This assumption is shared by theorists who, denying the
            possibility of recovering authorial intentions, also deny the
            possibility of valid interpretations. But once it is seen that the
            meaning of a text is simply identical to the author's intended
            meaning, the project of grounding meaning in intention becomes
            incoherent. Since the project itself is incoherent, it can neither
            succeed nor fail, hence both theoretical attitudes toward intention
            are irrelevant. The mistake made by theorists has been to imagine
            the possibility or desirability of moving from one term (the
            author's intended meaning) to a second term (the text's meaning),
            when actually the two terms are the same. One can neither succeed
            nor fail in deriving one term from the other, since to have one is
            already to have them both.
            In the following two sections we will try to show in detail how
            theoretical accounts of intention always go wrong. In the fourth
            section we will undertake a similar analysis of an influential
            account of the role interpretive assumptions or beliefs play in the
            practice of literary criticism. The issues of belief and intention
            are, we think, central to the theoretical enterprise; our
            discussion of them is thus directed not only against specific
            theoretical arguments but against theory in general. Our examples
            are meant to represent the central mechanism of all theoretical
            arguments, and our treatment of them is meant to indicate that all
            such arguments will fail and fail in the same way. If we are right,
            then the whole enterprise of critical theory is misguided and
            should be abandoned.
John Paul Russo
         I.A. Richards in Retrospect
         I. A. Richards ushered the spirit of Cambridge realism into
            semantics and literary criticism. When he arrived as an
            undergraduate in 1911, Cambridge was in the midst of its finest
            philosophical flowering since the Puritanism and Platonism of the
            seventeenth century. The revolution of G. E. Moore and Bertrand
            Russell against Hegelian idealism had already occurred; the Age of
            Principia was under way. There was a reassertion of native
            empiricism and a new interest in philosophical psychology, and the
            whole discussion was marked increasingly by a preoccupation with
            language. Richards, too, would break with the past, with the
            history of criticism in the previous two generations, gather
            psychological ideas to establish an empirical semantics and
            aesthetics, and center his attention on language. Although Romantic
            and late-Victorian values inform his theories, Richards set down an
            original criticism on first principles, not on tradition. Many of
            his books' titles show this rationalist strains: The Foundations of
            Aesthetics (1921), The Meaning of Meaning (1923), Principles of
            Literary Criticism (1924), Basic Rules of Reason (1933), and The
            Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936). The originality and influence of
            Richards' criticism can be shown by the number of terms he put into
            circulation, terms which became the currency of debate for almost
            half a century: close reading, tone, pseudostatement, stock
            response, tension, equilibrium, tenor and vehicle of metaphor,
            emotive and referential language.
            John Paul Russo is a professor and chairman of the English
            department at the University of Miami. He is the editor of I. A.
            Richards' Complementarities: Uncollected Essays and the author of
            Alexander Pope: Tradition and Identity and an annotated
            bibliography of Richards' works. He is currently completing a
            critical biography of Richards. "A Study in Influence: The Moore-
            Richards Paradigm," his previous contribution to ,
            appeared in the Summer 1979 issue.
Paul de Man
         Sign and Symbol in Hegel's Aesthetics
         We are far removed, in this section of the Encyclopediaon memory,
            from the mnemotechnic icons described by Francis Yates in The Art
            of Memoryand much closer to Augustine's advice about how to
            remember and to psalmodize Scripture. Memory, for Hegel, is the
            learning by rote of names, or of words considered as names, and it
            can therefore not be separated from the notation, the inscription,
            or the writing down of these names. In order to remember, one is
            forced to write down what one is likely to forget. The idea in
            other words, makes its sensory appearance, in Hegel, as the
            material inscription of names. Thought is entirely dependent on a
            mental faculty that is mechanical through and through, as remote as
            can be from the sounds and the images of the imagination or from
            the dark mine of recollection, which lies beyond the reach of words
            and of thought
            […]
            No wonder, then, that Hegel's Aestheticsturns out to be a double
            and possibly duplicitous text. Dedicated to the preservation and
            the monumentalization of classical art, it also contains all the
            elements which make such a preservation impossible from the start.
            Theoretical reasons prevent the convergence of the apparently
            historical and the properly theoretical components of the work.
            This results in the enigmatic statements that have troubled Hegel's
            readers, such as the assertion that art is for us a thing of the
            past. This has usually been interpreted and criticized or, in some
            rare instances, praised as a historical diagnosis disproven or
            borne out by actual history. We can now assert that the two
            statements "art is for us a thing of the past" and "the beautiful
            is the sensory manifestation of the idea" are in fact one and the
            same. To the extent that the paradigm for art is thought rather
            than perception, the sign rather than the symbol, writing rather
            than painting or music, it will also be memorization rather than
            recollection. As such, it belongs indeed to a past which, in
            Proust's words, could never be recaptured, retrouve. Art is "of the
            past" in a radical sense, in that, like memorization, it leaves the
            interiorization of experience forever behind. It is of the past to
            the extent that it materially inscribes, and thus forever forgets,
            its ideal content. The reconciliation of the two main theses of the
            Aestheticsoccurs at the expense of the aesthetic as a stable
            philosophical category. What the Aestheticscalls the beautiful
            terms turns out to be, also, something very remote from what we
            associate with the suggestiveness of symbolic form.
            Paul de Man, Sterling Professor of the Humanities at Yale
            University, is the author of Blindness and Insightand Allegories of
            Readingand is currently completing a book tentatively titled The
            Resistance to Theory. His previous contributions to Critical
            Inquiryare "Political Allegory in Rousseau" (Summer 1976), "The
            Epistemology of Metaphor" (Autumn 1978), and "A Letter" (Spring
            1982).
Michel Foucault
         The Subject and Power
         I would like to suggest another way to go further toward a new
            economy of power relations, a way which is more empirical, more
            directly related to our present situation, and which implies more
            relations between theory and practice. It consists of taking the
            forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting
            point. To use another metaphor, t consists of using this resistance
            as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations,
            locate their position, and find out their point of application and
            the methods used. Rather than analyzing power from the point of
            view of its internal rationality, it consists of analyzing power
            relations through the antagonism of strategies.
            […]
            Let us come back to the definition of the exercise of power as a
            way in which certain actions may structure the field of other
            possible actions. What, therefore, would be proper to a
            relationship of power is that it be a mode of action upon actions.
            That is to say, power relations are rooted deep in the social
            nexus, not reconstituted "above" society as a supplementary
            structure whose radical effacement one could perhaps dream of. In
            any case, to live in a society is to live in such a way that action
            upon other actions is possible-- and in fact ongoing. A society
            without power relations can only be an abstraction. Which, be it
            said in passing, makes all the more politically necessary the
            analysis of power relations in a given society, their historical
            formation, the source of their strength or fragility, the
            conditions which are necessary to transform some or to abolish
            others. For to say that there cannot be a society without power
            relations is not to say either that those which are established are
            necessary or, in any case, that power constitutes a fatality at the
            heart of societies, such that it cannot be undermined. Instead, I
            would say that the analysis, elaboration, and bringing into
            question of power relations and the "agonism" between power
            relations and the instransitivity of freedom is a permanent
            political task inherent in all social existence.
            […]
            In effect, between a relationship of power and a strategy of
            struggle there is a reciprocal appeal, a perpetual linking and a
            perpetual reversal. At every moment the relationship of power may
            become a confrontation between two adversaries. Equally, the
            relationship between adversaries in society may, at every moment,
            give place to the putting into operation of mechanisms of power.
            The consequence of this instability is the ability to decipher the
            same events and the same transformations either from inside the
            history of struggle or from the standpoint of the power
            relationships. The interpretations which result will not consist of
            the same elements of meaning or the same links or the same types of
            intelligibility, although they refer to the same historical fabric,
            and each of the two analyses must have reference to the other. In
            fact, it is precisely the disparities between the two readings
            which make visible those fundamental phenomena of "domination"
            which are present in a large number of human societies.
            Michel Foucault has been teaching at the Collège de France since
            1970. His works include Madness and Civilization (1961), The Birth
            of the Clinic (1966), Discipline and Punish (1975), and History of
            Sexuality (1976), the first volume of a projected five-volume
            study.
