Sacvan Bercovitch
         The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History
         For my present purposes, and in terms of my immediate concerns, the
            problem of ideology in American literary history has three
            different though closely related aspects: first, the multivolume
            American literary history I have begun to edit; then, the concept
            of ideology as a constituent part of literary study, and, finally,
            the current revaluation of the American Renaissance. I select this
            period because it has been widely regarded as both the source and
            the epitome of our literary tradition; because it has become,
            accordingly, the focal point of the critical revision now under way
            in American studies; and because, from either of these
            perspectives, literary or critical, it seems to me a particularly
            fitting subject for the occasion. For one thing, we owe the idea of
            an American Renaissance to F. O. Matthiessen, who was a prime mover
            of the Salzburg Seminar, and a member of its first faculty in 1947.
            Moreover, American Renaissance was a classic work of revisionist
            criticism. It reset the terms for the study of American literary
            history; it gave us a new canon of classic texts; and it inspired
            the growth of American studies in the United States and abroad. It
            is not too much to say that Matthiessen, American Renaissance, and
            the Salzburg Seminar brought American literature to postwar Europe.
            What followed, from the late forties through the sixties, was the
            flowering of a new academic field, complete with programs of study,
            periodicals, theses, conferences, and distinguished procession of
            scholarly authorities, including many graduates of the Salzburg
            Seminar.
            Matthiessen figures as a watershed in this development. For if
            American Renaissance marked the seeding-time of a new academic
            field, it was also the harvest of some three decades of literary
            study. I refer, first of all, to the dual legacy that Matthiessen
            acknowledges of T. S. Eliot and Vernon Parrington which is to
            say, the partnership in American Renaissance between the terms
            "literary" and "history"; or, in the words
            of Matthiessen's subtitle, between Art and Expression in the
            Age of Emerson and Whitman:"art," meaning a small group
            of aesthetic masterpieces, and "expression," meaning
            representative works, reflecting and illuminating the culture at
            large. It was the remarkable achievement of Matthiessen that his
            book yokes these concepts gracefully together. Somehow, one concept
            seems to support the other. The historical designation American
            seems richer for its association with an aesthetic renaissance;
            Emerson's and Whitman's art gains substance by its
            capacity to express the age. Matthiessen himself did not feel it
            necessary to explain the connection. But we can see in retrospect
            that what made it work what made it, indeed, unnecessary for
            Matthiessen to explain the connection was an established
            consensus, or rather a consensus long in the making, which American
            Renaissance helped establish. I mean a consensus about the term
            "literary" that involved the legitimation of a certain
            canon, and a consensus about the term "history" that
            was legitimated by a certain concept of America.
             
            Sacvan Bercovitch is Carswell Professor of English and American
            Literature at Harvard University. He is the Author of The Puritan
            Origins of the American Self and The American Jeremiad, among other
            works. He has also edited several collections of essays, most
            recently Reconstructing American Literary History (1986).
Norman N. Holland
         I-ing Film
         Film theorists talk enthusiastically these days in terms of
            semiotics, sutures, and systems of meaning. I think we can usefully
            frame these theories by some evidence as to how some actual readers
            make actual theories from an actual film. To that end, I would like
            to explore here what three people, Agnes, Norm, and Ted, said about
            The Story of O.It seems to me that if any film should demonstrate
            the fixity of semiotic and other codes, surely a pornographic film
            should.
            You might call this essay, then, the story of this I storying three
            other I's storying The Story of O.1 "Storying" is
            Audrey Grant's verb, and by it she intends the representing
            of an event in your own mind and telling somebody about it.2In this
            essay, then, I propose to tell you how I represent in my mind how
            these three individuals represented in their minds The Story of O.
            Sometimes we felt or thought about the film more or less alike, and
            sometimes we squarely contradicted one another. I want to ask two
            questions of these responses. First, how can we relate their
            variety to the singleness of the film? Second, how can we relate
            their variety to the generality of any codes that govern the seeing
            of films?
             
            Norman N. Hollandis Milbauer Eminent Scholar at the University of
            Florida. His most recent book, The I (1985), develops a widely
            useful model for thinking about humans' perceiving,
            interpreting, reading, and generally I-ing. His most recent
            contribution to  is "Interactive
            Fiction" (with Anthony J. Niesz) in the September 1984 issue.
Geoffrey Ward
         Dying to Write: Maurice Blanchot and Tennyson's "Tithonus"
         The customary assumption about dying is that one would rather not.
            The event of death itself should be postponed for as long as
            possible, and comfort may be gained from doctrines which promise a
            victory over it. We celebrate those who try to cheat it. The dying
            Henry James thought he was Napoleon, and there is something in
            that, over and above the pathos of a wandering mind, that
            exemplifies, however parodically, the mental set we expect to find
            and what we relish in those who attempt to press their own strong
            case against the disintegrative flow of time and change. We assume
            that one should struggle against death, setting such a stamp on
            life that even if the body must die, something the mind has done
            may not. Attitudes that run counter to this stubbornness are
            thought defeatist or unwholesome. In his own decline, Charles
            Baudelaire, catching sight of himself in a mirror, bowed, thinking
            himself a stranger. That confusion is more chilling than
            Jams' because it undermines the treasured integrity of the
            self: it shows that death is not an invader attacking suddenly from
            outside. We are in one sense always in its keeping. In this essay I
            shall argue that whatever revolt against death may catalyse the act
            of writing poetry, poems are intimately tied to death in ways that
            complicate and even undermine that revolt. Indeed, since the
            inception of Romanticism (within which poetry still comes into
            being), a poem in order to be a poem has had to engage not only
            with the fact that in the midst of life we are in its negation, but
            also with death's analogues: madness, trance, divisions and
            questionings of the self. The relationship between poetry and the
            disruption of the customary self may even be celebratory.
            But before investigating the relationship between poetry and death,
            we had better be sure that one can indeed die:
            At first glance, the preoccupation of the writer who writes in
            order to be able to die is an affront to common sense. It would
            seem we can be sure of at least one event: it will come without any
            approach on our part, without our bestirring ourselves at all; yes,
            it will come. That is true, but at the same time it is not true,
            and indeed quite possibly it lacks truth altogether. At least it
            does not have the kind of truth which we feel in the world, which
            is the measure of our action and of our presence in the world. What
            makes me disappear from the world cannot finds its guarantee there;
            and thus, in a way, having no guarantee, it is not certain. This
            explains why no one is linked to death by realcertitude. No one is
            sure of dying.1
            No one can think to cheat death, but to contemplate death is to
            introduce into thought the epitome of doubt. The one thing I can
            never know in advance or know demonstrably, by my very nature and
            by its, is the actual instant of my own death. Conventionally,
            "I will go when my time comes": the phrase gestures
            toward the privacy of each human death, and the Protestant tone of
            "my time" part predestination, part
            ownership barely hides the inaccessibility of death inside
            that privacy. There are two certainties in life. One is that death
            will come. The other is that no one can be sure of this. Perhaps no
            one has truly died yet.
             
            1. Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock
            (Lincoln, Nebr., 1982), p. 95; all further references to this work,
            abbreviated SL,will be included in the text.
             
            Geoffrey Ward is lecturer in English at the University of
            Liverpool. He is at present completing his first critical book, The
            Poetry of Estrangement.His published articles include essays on
            symbolism in John Ashbery, Conrad's English, metaphor in
            Shelley's longer poems, the novels of Henry Green, and
            Wyndham Lewis. He has also published five volumes of poetry, mot
            recently Not the Hand Itself(1983).
Charles L. Griswold
         The Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the Washington Mall:
            Philosophical Thoughts on Political Iconography
         My reflections on the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (VVM) were provoked
            some time ago in a quite natural way, by a visit to the memorial
            itself. I happened upon it almost by accident, a fact that is due
            at least in part to the design of the Memorial itself (see fig. 1).
            I found myself reduced to awed silence, and I resolved to attend
            the dedication ceremony on November 13, 1982. It was an
            extraordinary event, without question the most moving public
            ceremony I have ever attended. But my own experience of the
            Memorial on that and other occasions is far from unique. It is
            almost commonplace among the many visitors to the VVM now the
            most visited of all the memorials in Washington a fact so
            striking as to have compelled journalists, art historians, and
            architects to write countless articles about the monument. And
            although philosophers traditionally have had little to say about
            architecture in general or about that of memorials in particular,
            there is much in the VVM and its iconography worthy of
            philosophical reflection. Self-knowledge includes, I hazard to say,
            knowledge of ourselves as members of the larger social and
            political context, and so includes knowledge of that context.
            Architecture need not memorialize or symbolize anything; or it may
            symbolize, but not in a memorializing way, let alone in a way that
            is tied to a nation'shistory. The structures on the
            Washington Mall belong to a particular species of recollective
            architecture, a species whose symbolic and normative content is
            prominent. After all, war memorials by their very nature recall
            struggles to the death over values. Still further, the architecture
            by which a people memorializes itself is a species of pedagogy. It
            therefore seeks to instruct posterity about the past and, in so
            doing, necessarily reaches a decision about what is worth
            recovering. It would thus be a mistake to try to view such
            memorials merely "aesthetically," in abstraction from
            all judgments about the noble and the base. To reflect
            philosophically on specific monuments, as I propose to do here,
            necessarily requires something more than a simply technical
            discussion of the theory of architecture or of the history of a
            given species of architecture. We must also understand the
            monument's symbolism, social context, and the effects its
            architecture works on those who participate in it. That is, we must
            understand the political iconography which shapes and is shaped y
            the public structure in question. To do less than this if I
            may state a complex argument in hopelessly few words is to
            fall short of the demands of true objectivity, of an understanding
            of the whole which the object is. To understand the meaning of the
            VVM requires that we understand, among other things, what the
            memorial means to those who visit it. This is why my observations
            about the dedication of the VVM and about the Memorial's
            continuing power over people play an important role in this essay.
             
            Charles L. Griswold,associate professor of philosophy at Howard
            University, is the author of Self-Knowledge in Plat's
            "Phaedrus"(1986) and has published widely in the areas
            of Greek philosophy, German Idealism, hermeneutics, and political
            philosophy. He is an editor of the Independent Journal of
            Philosophy and a recipient of numerous awards and fellowships.
            Currently he is working on a project which centers on Adam
            Smith's notion of the "self" and Smith's
            relationship to Stoicism and to the American Founding.
Henry Staten
         Conrad's Mortal Word
         Heart of Darkness is the story of a quest for truth but a quest, we
            discover, that is veiled in ironies. But just how radical are these
            ironies? When Marlow tells us that Kurtz's dying whisper
            enunciates a truth, does he give us a solid kernel around which we
            can build our further questioning, concerning, for example, whether
            Marlow preserves or betrays the truth he has been given?"
            This has been the assumption of most critics; regardless of the
            ingenuities by which the varieties of interpretation has shown that
            Marlow in the end lies or does not lie, the axis of interpretation
            has almost always been defined by Kurtz's presumed truth. Why
            should this be so? Why should Kurtz's whisper be more
            significant than, say, the cry of the Intended with which the story
            culminates? But there are presuppositions in force here so strong
            that it seems senseless to ask this question. Classic
            presuppositions: the woman is dominated by emotion and desire, and
            her cry is at the other pole from the nonlibidinal utterance of
            truth. Marlow would agree with this assessment for him, women
            are "out of touch with the truth" which you have to be
            "man enough" to face. So our truth-seeking criticism,
            which doubts much of what Marlow says, does not doubt the terms in
            which Marlow conceives of truth and its authority.
            Let us consider an example of the truth-seeking reading of Heart of
            Darkness,examining the ideology that sanctions this form of
            interpretation and showing how its presuppositions cooperate with
            Marlow's. Our specimen will be a fairly recent PMLA article
            by Garrett Stewart called "Lying as Dying in Heart of
            Darkness." Stewart's "existential" reading
            invokes an economics of truth: Kurtz truthfully confronts death,
            facing and passing judgment upon the corruption of his being that
            emerges as fulfilled in his final moment; Marlow "lives
            through" Kurtz's death and has the opportunity to
            preserve and transmit Kurtz's "legacy of
            insight"; his lie, however, "kills the meaning of a
            death," "squandering … Kurtz's delegated
            revelation on a squeamish deceit."1
             
            1. Garrett Stewart, "Lying as Dying in Heart of
            Darkness," PMLA 95 (May 1980): 330, 329, 326; all further
            references to this essay, abbreviated "L," will be
            included in the text.
             
            Henry Staten is associate professor of English and adjunct
            associate professor of philosophy at the University of Utah. He is
            the author of Wittgenstein and Derrida.The present essay is part of
            a book in progress on mourning and idealization in Western
            literature.
Lee Bartlett
         What is "Language Poetry"?
         W. H. Auden, the sometimes Greta Garbo of twentieth-century poetry,
            once told Stephen Spender that he liked America better than England
            because in America one could be alone. Further, in his introduction
            to The Criterion Book of Modern American Verse Auden remarked that
            while in England poets are considered members of a "clerkly
            caste," in America they are an "aristocracy of
            one." Certainly it does seem to be the individual
            poet Whitman, Williams, Olson, Plath, O'Hara,
            Ginsberg who has altered the landscape of American poetry and
            prosody, not the group. And most American literary
            "movements," as Robert Creeley has pointed out, are
            simply comprised of a few people who on occasion drink together,
            and who are as likely as not to end the evening in violent argument
            over an aesthetic or political point. Yet the notion of schools or
            movements remains, in mainstream historical criticism at least, a
            vital one. How many introductions to anthologies of American
            poetry, for example, continue to use such rubrics as the
            Transcendentals, the Populists, the Black Mountain poets, the
            Beats, the New York group? And while established poets often rebel
            from any sense that they are part of a larger community, which by
            definition is self-limiting, they are often complicit in their
            initial categorization. For poets as well as critics the idea of a
            school is often a useful fiction (Emerson knew this, as did Pound
            and Rexroth) serving as both a kind of protective hothouse and a
            platform for getting a hearing.
            The most recent "group" of American poets the
            first since the anthology wars of the early sixties (when many
            powerful aesthetics were scrambling for position) really to be of
            more than passing interest and perhaps to be actually capable of
            bringing about a major shift of attention in American poetry and
            poetics is the so-called "Language" school.
            Individual volumes by poets often considered part of this group
            number well into three figures now and there have been important
            journals and anthologies produced in a serious and sustained
            fashion by these writers. Yet in part because of what seems the
            essentially hermetic character of the project (which is too
            multifaceted and diffuse to be called a project at all), there has
            been little notice of this activity by academic critics or
            reviewers.1 What I'd like to do here is briefly map a few
            major aspects of the territory, describing some of the practical
            and theoretical questions which seem to occupy many of these
            writers in their ongoing critique of the "workshop
            poem."
             
            1. Two important exceptions are discussions of some of this work in
            Stephen Fredman, Poet's Prose: The Crisis in American Verse
            (Cambridge, 1983) and Marjorie Perloff's review "The
            Word as Such: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry in the Eighties,"
            American Poetry Review 13 (May/June 984): 15-22. All further
            references to Perloff's article, abbreviated
            "WS," will be included in the text. For a discussion of
            the various Language poetry journals and anthologies, see my
            chapter "American Poetry, 1940s to the Present" in
            American Literary Scholarship: An Annual/1983,ed. Warren French
            (Durham, N.C., 1985), pp. 349-74.
             
            Lee Bartlett,an associate professor of English, has directed the
            University of New Mexico's creative writing program for five
            years. Coeditor of the critical journal American Poetry, his
            Talking Poetry: Conversations in the Workshop with Contemporary
            Poets will be published this fall. Currently he is writing a
            biography of William Everson.
David Carrier
         The Presentness of Painting: Adrian Stokes as Aestheticism
         Adrian Stokes (1902-72), long admired by a small, highly
            distinguished, mostly English circle, was the natural successor to
            Pater and Ruskin. But though his place in cultural history is
            important, what is of particular interest now to art historians is
            his theory of the presentness of painting, a theory which offers a
            challenging critique of the practice of artwriting. From Vasari to
            the present, the most familiar rhetorical strategy of the art
            historian is the narrative of "the form, prophet-saviour-
            apostles," in which the first artist poses some problem that
            his successors develop and their successors solve.1 Such very
            different books as Art and Illusion and Art and Culture deploy that
            plan. The three periods of naturalism in E. H. Gombrich's
            narrative antiquity, Renaissance religious narrative,
            nineteenth-century landscape function like Clement
            Greenberg's sequence old master art, early French
            modernism, American abstract expressionism. Gombrich and Greenberg
            disagree about how to narrate art's history and about which
            works to include in that narrative Gombrich asserts that
            cubism closes the canon while for Greenberg analytical cubism
            anticipates Jackson Pollock but in each case, the art
            historian aims, as the novelist does, to tell a satisfying story
            and achieve narrative closure, and so how we think of the artworks
            the historian discusses depends in part upon the structure of the
            narrative. In a certain mood, we may find this fact intolerable.
            Why should a mere text tell us how to see the painting we may stand
            before?
            Stokes' attempt to respond to this mood belongs to a
            tradition of early twentieth-century antihistorical thinking. For
            Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin's sculpture aimed to "refer
            to nothing that lay beyond it." For Ezra Pound, an image
            "is real because we know it directly"; Henri Gaudier-
            Brzeska could read Chinese ideograms without knowing that language
            because those ideograms are transparently meaningful images. For
            Wyndham Lewis, a musical piece is inferior to a statue,
            "always there in its entirety before you."2 Such an
            artwork need not be interpreted because it contains "within
            itself all that is relevant to itself."3 All art is
            accessible to the gifted observer, and time is, in an interesting
            double sense, irrelevant. We see directly the meaning of works even
            from distant cultures; the visual artwork is experienced all at
            once, outside of time. If these claims are correct, what is the
            artwriter to do? Speaking of the Tempio Malatestiana, Hugh Kenner
            points to this issue:
            There is no description of the Tempio in accordance with good
            Vorticist logic: one art does not attempt what another can do
            better, and the meaning of the Tempio has been fully explicated on
            the spot by Agostino di Duccio with his chisel.4
             
            1. Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the Orators: Humanist Observers of
            Painting in Italy and the Discovery of Pictorial Composition 1350-
            1450 (Oxford, 1971), p. 75.
            2. Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin,trans. Jessie Lemont and Hans Trausil
            (London, 1948), p. 19; Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir (New
            York, 1970), p. 86; Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man (Boston,
            1957), p. 174.
            3. Frank Kermode, Romantic Image (London and Glasgow, 1971), p.
            107.
            4. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971), p.
            428.
             
            David Carrier,associate professor of philosophy at Carnegie-Mellon
            University, is coauthor, with Mark Roskill, of Truth and Falsehood
            in Visual Images and author of the forthcoming Artwriting, a study
            of recent American art criticism. He is working on a history of art
            history.
Jerome Christensen
         "Like a Guilty Thing Surprised": Deconstruction, Coleridge, and_the
            Apostasy of Criticism
         In his recent book Criticism and Social Change Frank Lentricchia
            melodramatically pits his critical hero Kenneth Burke, advocate of
            the intellect's intervention in social life, against the
            villainous Paul de Man, "undisputed master in the United
            States of what is called deconstruction." Lentricchia charges
            that "the insidious effect of [de Man's] work is not
            the proliferating replication of his way of reading … but the
            paralysis of praxis itself: an effect that traditionalism, with its
            liberal view of the division of culture and political power, should
            only applaud."1 He goes on to prophesy that
            The deconstruction of deconstruction will reveal, against apparent
            intention, a tacit political agenda after all, one that can only
            embarrass deconstruction, particularly its younger proponents whose
            activist experiences within the socially wrenching upheavals of the
            1960s and early 1970s will surely not permit them easily to relax,
            without guilt and self-hatred, into resignation and ivory tower
            despair. [CSC, p. 40]
            Such is Lentricchia's strenuous conjuration of a historical
            moment in which he can forcefully intervene a summons fraught
            with the pathos excited by any reference to the heady days of
            political enthusiasm during the war in Vietnam. Lentricchia
            ominously figures a scene of rueful solitude where de Manian
            lucidity breaks into the big chill. And maybe it will. But
            Lentricchia furnishes no good reason why it should. De Manian
            deconstruction is "deconstructed" by Lentricchia to
            reveal "against apparent intention, a tacit political
            agenda." And this revelation is advertised as a sure
            embarrassment to the younger practitioners of
            deconstruction sweepingly characterized as erstwhile
            political activists who have, wide-eyed, opted for a critical
            approach that magically entangles its proponents in the soul-
            destroying delights of rhetoric and reaction. Left unexamined in
            Lentricchia's story, however, is the basis for the initial
            rapport between radicalism and deconstruction. Why should
            collegiate activists have turned into deconstructionsists? Is not
            that, in Lentricchia's terms, the same question as asking why
            political activists should have turned to literary criticism (or
            indeed literature) at all? If we suppose this original turn (to
            criticism, the deconstruction) to be intentional, how could the
            initiates of this critical approach ever be genuinely betrayedinto
            embarrassment by time or by its herald, Frank Lentricchia? On the
            face of it, the traducement of a secret intention would be unlikely
            to come as a surprise, since deconstructing deconstruction is not
            only the enterprise of Marxist critics like Lentricchia but also of
            Jacques Derrida, archdeconstructor, who unashamedly identified the
            embarrassment of intention as constitutive of the deconstructive
            method. If deconstruction is at once a natural outlet for activists
            and the first step on a slippery slope that ends in apostasy (for
            surely it is that hard word which Lentricchia politely suppresses),
            it suggests a phenomenon with contours more suggestively intricate,
            if not less diabolically seductive, than the program Lentricchia
            outlines. And it is a phenomenon as worrisomely affiliative as it
            is bafflingly intricate. We need to know whether the relations
            between deconstruction and radical politics, between deconstruction
            and apostasy between deconstruction and criticism, and between
            apostasy and criticism are necessary or contingent, or neither and
            both at once.
             
            1. Frank Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change(Chicago, 1983),
            p. 38; all further references to this work, abbreviated CSC,will be
            included in the text.
             
            Jerome Christensen,professor of English at the Johns Hopkins
            University, is the author of Coleridge's Blessed Machine of
            Language and the forthcoming Hume's Practice: The Career of
            an Enlightenment Man of Letters. He is currently at work on a study
            of Byron and the issue of strong romanticism.
Stephano Rosso
         An Interview with Paul de Man
         Rosso: Can you say something more about the differences between
            your work and Derrida's?
            De Man: I'm not really the right person to ask where the
            difference is, because, as I feel in many respects close to
            Derrida, I don't determine whether my work resembles or is
            different from of Derrida. My initial engagement with
            Derrida which I think is typical and important for all that
            relationship (to the extent that I can think or want to think about
            it at all) which followed closely upon my first encounter with him
            in Baltimore at the colloquium on "The Languages of Criticism
            and the Sciences of Man" had not to do with Derrida nor
            with me, but with Rousseau. It happened that we were both working
            on Rousseau and basically on the same text, by sheer coincidence.
            It was in relation to Rousseau that I was anxious to define, to try
            to work out some … not discrepancies … but some change of emphasis
            between what Derrida does and what I'm doing. And there may
            be something in that difference between us that remained there, to
            the extent that in a very genuine sense not as denegation or
            as false modesty (though whenever one says "not out of
            denegation" one is awaking the suspicion to be even more
            denying than before … so you can't get out of that bind …
            ) my starting  point, as I think I already told you, is not
            philosophical but basically philological and for that reason
            didactical, text-oriented. Therefore I have a tendency to put upon
            texts an inherent authority, which is stronger, I think, than
            Derrida is willing to put on them. I assume, as a working
            hypothesis (as a working hypothesis, because I know better than
            that), that the text knows in an absolute way what it's
            doing. I know this is not the case, but it is a necessary working
            hypothesis that Rousseau knows at any time what he is doing and as
            such there is no need to deconstruct Rousseau. In a complicated
            way, I would hold to that statement that "the text
            deconstructs itself, is self-deconstructive" rather than
            being deconstructed by a philosophical intervention from the
            outside of the text. The difference is that Derrida's text is
            so brilliant, so incisive, so strong that whatever happens in
            Derrida, it happens between him and his own text. He doesn't
            need Rousseau, he doesn't need anybody else; I do need them
            very badly because I never had an idea of my own, it was always
            through a text, through the critical examination of a text … I am a
            philologist and not a philosopher: I guess there is a difference
            there … I think that, on the other hand, it is of some interest to
            see how the two different approaches can occasionally coincide, at
            the point that Gasché in the two articles he as written on this
            topic (and which are together with an article by Godzich certainly
            the best things that have been written on it) says that Derrida and
            myself are the closest when I do not use his terminology, and the
            most remote when I use terms such as deconstruction:I agree with
            that entirely. But, again, I am not the one to decide on this
            particular matter and I don't claim to be on that level …
             
            Stephano Rossoteaches English literature at the University of
            Verona (Italy) and is writing a dissertation in comparative
            literature at SUNY Binghamton. Among other works, he has
            coedited, with Naurizio Ferraris, Decostruzione tra filosofia e
            letteraturaand Estetica e decostruzione. He is presently
            translating Paul de Man's Resistance to Theory into Italian.
Edwin Martin
         On Seeing Walton's Great-Grandfather
         Kendall Walton says that photographs are "transparent"
            ("Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic
            Realism,"  11 [December 1984]: 246-77). By
            this he means that "we see the world through them" (p.
            251). That is,
            With the assistance of the camera, we can see not only around
            corners and what is distant or small; we can also see into the
            past. We see long deceased ancestors when we look at dusty
            snapshots of them…. We see,quite literally, our dead relatives
            themselves when we look at photographs of them. [Pp. 251, 252]
            Walton is explicit on one point: he does not mean merely that we
            have the impression of seeing ancestors, or that photographs
            supplement vision, or that they are duplicates or reproductions or
            substitutes or surrogates. Rather, "the viewer of a
            photograph sees, literally, the scene that was photographed"
            (p. 252). In what follows I will urge that Walton's argument
            for this view is insufficient.
            Walton is led to his conclusion by an account of the nature of
            seeing. He claims that "part of what it is to see something
            is to have visual experiences which are cause by it in a purely
            mechanical manner" (p. 261). The mechanical connection is
            important here. For "to perceive things is to be in
            contactwith them in a certain way. A mechanical connection with
            something, like that of photography, counts as contact" (pp.
            269-70). Paintings and other "handmade" representations
            fail to have the required mechanical connection; they are humanly
            mediated rather than mechanically produced. Consequently, Walton
            thinks, paintings are not transparent. On the other hand,
            "objects cause their photographs and the visual experiences
            of viewers mechanically." And "so we see the objects
            through the photographs" (p. 261).
             
            Edwin Martin is associate professor of philosophy at Indiana
            University. He is currently completing a photographic portrait of
            American tent circus life.
Kendall L. Walton
         Looking Again through Photographs: A Response to Edwin_Martin
         My great-grandfather died before I was born. He never saw me. But I
            see him occasionally when I look at photographs of him. They
            are not great photographs, by any means, but like most photographs
            they are transparent. We see things through them.
            Edwin Martin objects. His response consists largely of citing
            examples of things which, he thinks, are obviously not transparent,
            and declaring that he finds no relevant difference between them and
            photographs: once we slide down the slippery slope as far as
            photographs there will be not stopping short of absurdity. The
            examples fail in their purpose, but they will help to clarify the
            reasons for the transparency of photographs. Several of them can be
            disposed of by noting that they jeopardize the transparency of
            (ordinary) photographs only if they jeopardize the very possibility
            of perception. The others appear to reflect a misconception of the
            issue before us and the nature of my claim.
            To perceive something is, in part, to have perceptual experiences
            caused by the object in question. This is scarcely controversial.
            It is also uncontroversial that additional restrictions are
            needed not all causes of one's visual experiences are
            objects of sight although exactly what the required
            restrictions are is a notoriously tricky question. One important
            restriction is that the causation must be appropriately independent
            of human action ("mechanical," if you like), in a sense
            which I explained (pp. 263-64). This, I argued, is what
            distinguishes photographs from "handmade" pictures,
            which are not transparent. Seismographs and footprints are caused
            just as "mechanically" as ordinary photographs are. So
            are photographs that are so badly exposed or focused that they fail
            to present images of the objects before the camera. So, also, are
            the visual experiences of those who look at seismograms,
            footprints, and such badly focused or exposed photographs. Yet we
            obviously do not see the causes of these things through them,
            Martin claims. How is it, then, that we see through ordinary
            photographs?
             
            Kendall L. Walton is professor of philosophy at the University of
            Michigan and author of a book on representation in the arts
            (forthcoming). His previous contribution to Critical
            Inquiry,"Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic
            Realism," appeared in the December 1984 issue.
