INTERTEXTUALITY AS INTERTEXT AND BOURGEOIS PROJECT
WILLIAM PLANK
(Modified conference paper)
The most important question in biological evolution is "What is the origin of new organisms or organs?" We have to answer this question against a background of evolution from which all teleology has been purged, and which sees evolutionary processes as random/.stochastic genetic mutations validated by fortuitous environments. If we do not reject teleology, we are led immediately into a metaphysics and a theology and might as well save ourselves time by sending a check to Jimmy Swaggart or Oral Roberts. If there is anything to systems theory, we are justified in asking the same question with the same rigor about the origin of texts. "What is the origin of the text?" Is it the mysterious motor of desire of Roland Barthes operating on the signifier and praised by Kristeva? Or can we not see, operating through such concepts as intertextuality, a linguo-cultural organism operating non-teleologically against a fortuitous historical-social background to produce from an enormous but finite number of units the texts under which we write the names Shakespeare, Joyce, Villon, Melville or even the wondrous signatures of Edgar A. Guest, Sidney Sheldon, Stephen Spielberg, Robert Ludlum and Cal Thomas? This linguistic organism writes itself in Benveniste's terms, and spins off the self as a structural by-product.
We have seen the great efforts to obliterate or domesticate subjectivity in the work of L
évi-Strauss, Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Benveniste and their apologists, reducing Sartre, for example, in the words of Benoist to a theologico-empirico-transcendentalist, while they invent other terms for Sartre's terminology. And certainly subjectivity, the reflective consciousness, has not only been abused in the last two hundred years by everybody from the romantics to the Montana Militia, but under the name of rationalism produced the shenanigans of scholasticism, nominalism (which has some intertextuality with structuralism and the cult of language) and was even the basis for Descartes' claim that he was rejecting scholasticism, while he set about to prove the same thing Aquinas did in the same way, and exacerbated the mind-body problem which shows up in another disguise in Kristeva's split-subject. The belief in language (or at least in representation) as the measure of all things, while it may have the appearance of the truth, is the product of boys who grew up in public schools and lycées in France in the shadow of Descartes, where the dictée and the explication de texte were the order of the day and which were then interpolated into a world-view.Subjectivity as reflective consciousness is bound up with brain evolution and is an evolutionary phenomenon like any other …or we are faced with the check to Jimmy Swaggart. To deny subjectivity then a role in the production of the text, even a text which writes itself within the bosom of the linguistic organism, is to pick and choose the pieces of the evolutionary process which fit the theory and is a weird kind of science. For if reflective consciousness is an invalid methodology, then decision becomes illusion (which it frequently is), perception is an automatic process of energy interchange, and empiricism, structuralism, and all science becomes nearly impossible since the scientific method no longer works. The nature of the external world does not assimilate directly to consciousness without the intermediary of representation (except perhaps for an amoeba), but at least the subject as a manipulator of representation appears to have evolutionary and neurological reality.
The comforting thing about intertextuality and Kristeva's split-subject, which seems to make it work, is that it is commonsensical: I feel comforted by a subject which is always already private and public and works through desire and helps me avoid the terrible confrontation between Sartre and L
évi-Strauss in the finale to The Naked Man. It may be observed, however, that Sartre's totalization serves the same purpose as intertextuality and probably escapes metaphysics just as easily. On the other hand, it is perhaps too easy a solution to split the subject in two. We could split it into as many pieces as R.D. Laing does, leaving us, of course, with an ultimate recourse to psychoanalysis to explain the self and the origin of the text, and explains why Kristeva is naturally interested in psychoanalysis and why Freud and Lacan are the lords of structure.There is no doubt that Sartrean totalization is a parallel concept with intertextuality in the sense that it solves the same problem and allows the public and private, the individual subject and the culturo-linguistic subject to exist within the same physiology and express itself. So that when we speak, we speak for others by necessity and not merely as a result of a Sartrean moral imperative.
When we speak as a split subject , when we realize that we are more than mere subject-as-Sartrean-pour-soi, then we need only a small sense of awe at the richness of our fine connections to feel the mystic--the same sense that one feels on reading Michel Serres' The Parasite and his praise of white noise, of chaos, whose wealth of potential message puts the self-as-operator, that Hermes, that messenger, in tough with a chaos, a non-order so potentially marvelous that we might well call it a primal chaos--a wonderful return to the inorganic that Freud called the death wish--a primal chaos waiting for each of us to observe its concatenations, waiting for each of us to structure as a kind of deity, like a Roland Barthes reading a rich text like an erotic demiurge.
For if the split-self puts the one piece of that self in touch with all language, text, and culture, then it acts as a totalizer. After all, Sartre and Lacan both indicated their belief in the rise of the self at a certain point with language, with access to the symbolic. And when L
évi-Strauss sings the praises of Rousseau in Tristes tropiques, and declares his belief in Structural Anthropology that matter will one day supply all the answers, it is hard not to see in Lévi-Strauss a mystique of matter so deep that he becomes a cousin of Teilhard de Chardin and a more distant relative of Deleuze…and as long as we are about it, all of them are in debt to Nietzsche and his proclamation that "the body is real."The problem with the common-sense approach is that it is dangerous in physics, where we have learned to have confidence in the non-intuitive as well. The intuitive, common-sense approach to science provides us merely with a reflection of the values our perceptions bind us to by their very nature. Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy, however, demonstrates that our mode of perception determines the outcome. Momentum and position cannot be determined at the same time. Determining the photon as particle prevents our perception of it as wave. "A photon, the fundamental unit of light, can behave like either a particle or a wave, and it can exist in an ambiguous state until a measurement is made."
We do not dare posit the existence of the photon as particle when we have measured it as wave, or it means having resort to hidden variables, local reality, and the check to Oral Roberts. I am suggesting merely that our understanding of the origin of texts is so bound to the nature of our perceptions that common sense may not be trustworthy. The law of parsimony, Occam's Razor, seems to be common-sensical, and although it has been the backbone of scientific description since the scientific revolution of the 17th century, structuralists seems to frequently ignore it: L
évi-Strauss wrote that we merely change complicated concepts into other complicated concepts. And Michel Serres shows us a universe of constantly changing states, disequilibrated and re-equilibrated, against a background of chaos, everything a parasite and a host, where Descartes foolishly (and cowardly) rejected his ancestors and futilely burned down his house to get rid of the rats/noise, where we inhabit a post-Leibnizian neo-baroque monadology.But let us get down to the existence of intertextuality. To do so I want to offer what I call the ontological proof for the existence of intertextuality in the best tradition of medieval scholasticism, and of our nominalist intertextual friends. To wit:
All texts are intertexts. If intertextuality is a text itself, then intertextuality by its very definition must exist as intertextuality. If it exists now, id does so because it had already existed, at least in pieces, somewhere. We find, in fact, that intertextuality was discovered in the late fifties or early sixties by the Argentine--Jorge Luis Borges and described in the story "Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote." It might be maintained that he discovered deconstruction at the same time. Admirers and exegetes of Borges are as clever and fecund as fundamentalist ministers with the Bible. The Bible is such a texte riche that during the past several centuries several hundred mutually exclusive roads to paradise have been identified as well as roads to hell for one's enemies--who do not even have to go through Atlanta.
Pierre Menard variously is explained by his readers to be a satire before the fact of structural literary theory and text theory. You will recall that he had the project of writing Don Quixote in such a way that it would not be a copy of the Quixote by Cervantes, but would in fact be identical to the one by Cervantes. He would do this by becoming Miguel de Cervantes and by assimilating the religion, culture, and history of 16th century Spain , in the 20th century. And most interesting of all, his Quixote would be more subtle than that of Cervantes, superior to the original.
Menard thus demonstrates the perfect deconstruction and reconstruction, the perfect text as intertext, and thus realizes what has been the project of the literary critic since Sainte-Beuve in the 19th century…namely, the analysis, explanation, assimilation, and in the case of the structural critic even, the substitution of the critic for the author as creator, the assimilation or the signifying act of the writer to the perfect comprehension of the critic--namely the domination of the work by the critic. It is a bourgeois project to dominate the work and every project of domination has as its goal the control of production. This domination is implicit even in the project of empiricism if we are to believe Marcuse's remarks in One Dimensional Man about the hidden project of domination in empirical science, because domination is the basic bourgeois project and is identical in most cases with western civilization. Pierre Menard is superior to Cervantes as the analytic critic is superior to the author because bourgeois analysis is better than creativity. Deconstruction thus realizes the bourgeois project and contradicts the Nietzschean theory of positive creativity.
Wait a minute!
Did Borges really discover intertextuality?
Perhaps it was Denis Diderot in his Pens
I open the notebooks of a famous professor and I read: Atheists, I accord to you that movement is essential to matter; what do you conclude from it, that the world is the result of the random cast of atoms, as of dice? I would just as soon you told me that the Iliad of Homer, or the Henriade of Voltaire is the result of the random cast of characters." I would indeed keep myself from using such reasoning with an atheist: this comparison would give him free rein. According to the laws of probability, he would say to me, I must not be surprised that a thing happens when it is possible, and that the difficulty of the event is compensated for by the quality of tries, or casts. There is such a number of thrown in which I would wager, with advantage, that I would get 100,000 sixes at the same time with 100,000 dice. Whatever might be the finite sum of characters with which it is proposed to create the Iliad by chance, there is such a finite number of throws which would make the proposition advantageous: My advantage would even be infinite if the quantity of throws agreed on was infinite. You are willing to agree with me, he would continue, that matter has existed from all eternity and that movement is essential t o it. To answer this favor, I am going to suppose with you that the world has no limits; that the multitude of atoms was infinite, and that this order which astonishes you is not disproved anywhere; now, from these reciprocal admissions, there would follow nothing else except that the possibility of creating fortuitously the universe is very small, but that the quantity of casts is infinite, that is to say that the difficulty of the event is much more than sufficiently compensated for by the multitude of casts. Therefore, is something ought to be repugnant to reason, it is the supposition that, matter having been in movement from all eternity, and that having in its infinite number of possible combinations an infinite number of admirable arrangements, there have not already been found any of these admirable arrangements in the infinite multitude of those t hat it has successively taken on. Therefore, the mind must be more astonished at the hypothetical duration of chaos than at the real birth of the universe.
This would be the point to refer to Stuart Kauffman's book on the statistical necessity of order among organic molecules--and to remind the reader that some post-structural critical describe the book as "writing itself."
It was one of Diderot's problems, which we see in such things as Jacques le Fataliste, that he was able, to his dismay, to do away with freedom and subjectivity as he has just done in the above quotation. We see the possibility that the self as subject may be a passive instrument of production, given infinity and the laws of probability. I do not feel comfortable with such a decision, and I think that it is an extreme case. I would like to see another explanation which would not do away with the randomness I believe lies at the heart of evolution, a solution short of sending my check to Oral Roberts. I do not thing Diderot's solution is bourgeois.
The explanation of problems of texts and of production in general by the appeal to the level of representation, by language, has been assailed by Gilles Deleuze in his attack on Jacques Lacan in the Anti-Oedipus:Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Jacques Lacan was the French psychiatrist who infuriated a couple of generations of English professors by what was his probably unnecessary hermeticism, reasoning with some justification that he writings were an attempt to catch them with their pants down. He is probably most accessible through the short book by J-B Fages, Comprendre Jacques Lacan. Briefly, Lacan traces the rise of the self from the organic level, through a mirror stage in which the consciousness identifies itself with the other, into a symbolic stage, where through the of infant-mother-father (what Lacan calls the Oedipus) the budding self achieves self-hood through the narrow defile of language….i.e., access to the symbolic. If one follows the reasoning carefully, one can see then that the self is in a very real way a metaphoric or a metonymic event, and that the subjectivity is of a linguistic nature. A tour de force!
Deleuze sets on this with a surrealist fury, accusing Lacan of interposing the level of representation between the auto-productive unconscious and production, an interposition which is the essence of the bourgeois project of domination. The way out of this trap according to Deleuze is "schizanalyse" or schizo-analysis. It is the madman, represented in this case by Antonin Artaud, who through his dismantling of the level of representation, may escape from this bourgeois-capitalist plot of Lacanian domination. Had Deleuze admitted his debt sufficiently to Nietzsche's idea of the positive creation of meaning, the madman Artaud would probably have been superfluous. Psychiatrists have frequently demonstrated that schizophrenics are more difficult to deceive than us normal people. The techniques and the concerns of Deleuze bear a great resemblance (intertextuality?) to those of Andr
é Breton.But he has stated the problem: is the access to understanding through the analysis of the level of representation inexorable tainted with the bourgeois project of domination and control of production? I thing it probably is. We are not Buddhists in a contemplative civilization. We are products of the industrial revolution and a capitalist system. Kristeva is a produce of soviet education. Capitalism and soviet communism both have the same expectations from the domination and control of production. Our empiricism hides the project of domination. We are westerners and as intellectuals are probably all condemned to being reluctant bourgeois. Intertextualism as a common-sense and enthusiastic methodology probably does not escape the western logos; I don't think anybody ever thought we could and most of us never wanted to. It is a useful exercise, both in dealing with texts and in convincing your travel committee to jar loose with a ticket from Montana to Florida in January.