398 BEN JONSON JOURNAL

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1 398 BEN JONSON JOURNAL Reed Way Dasenbrock, Truth and Consequences: Intentions, Conventions, and the New Thematics. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, xvii pages. The past three decades have been exceptionally lively for anyone interested in literary theory (i.e., for anyone genuinely curious about what, why, and how we do whatever it is that we do). It would be hard to think of a better book to recommend to a beginning or advanced student of recent theory than this one by Reed Way Dasenbrock. Dasenbrock not only covers all the most important figures and issues, and he not only discusses them in extremely lucid prose, but, most important, he brings to these matters a very heavy and healthy dose of skepticism. His unusual familiarity with the traditions of analytical philosophy (i.e., with the kind of philosophy taken most seriously by most philosophers) makes him an ideal commentator on recent trends, especially since he has obviously read closely the works of the authors he criticizes. This is one of the best books ever produced in a highly important field, and certainly it is one of the first places a reader should go if she wants an intelligent, thorough, fair-minded critique of such figures as Althusser, Barthes, Bourdieu, Culler, de Man, Derrida, Fish, Foucault, Greenblatt, Kuhn, Lyotard, Marx, Miller, Patterson, Rorty, and Smith. It is also one of the best introductions a student of literature could hope to find to the ideas of such less familiar thinkers as Austin, Davidson, Gadamer, Grice, Popper, Putnam, Quine, and Searle. Dasenbrock sets the disputes of literary theorists in a broad philosophical context without ever losing sight of the concrete issues likely to be most important to most of his readers. This is a book in which one clearly perceives both the forest and the trees. No summary can do justice to Dasenbrock's patient, painstaking engagement with the theorists he critiques, but an attempt at summary nonetheless seems worth the effort, if only to suggest how much ground he covers. He opens by defining, in broad terms, what he calls "The Conventionalist Paradigm," noting that an important aspect of this paradigm for literary studies is "the power it assigns to the community or group in defining our values

2 Book Reviews 399 and views in ways we are not fully aware of" (7). As examples of this kind of thinking, he mentions three major figures: Richard Rorty develops what I call a conventionalist theory of truth; Barbara Herrnstein Smith a conventionalist theory of literary value; and Stanley Fish a conventionalist theory of literary meaning; Fish and Smith declare that these conventionalisms also entail a conventionalist view of the existence of texts and even of human selfhood. Each of the three supports these positions by drawing on analytic philosophy, primarily analytic philosophy of language, but also on philosophy of science and implicitly on ethical and moral theory as well, and each claims that this conventionalism represents the latest on and from these philosophical fields. However, their "take" on analytic philosophy is in need of amendment because it is over thirty years out of date. As I hope to show in detail, the best contemporary work in these fields leads to conclusions very different from their own. (5) In his next two chapters, Dasenbrock argues that "the evolution of analytic philosophy at first leads toward conventionalism but ultimately leads away from it" (19). He traces this evolution throughout the twentieth century, focusing especially on the pivotal figure of Thomas Kuhn. In discussing Kuhn, Dasenbrock employs a tactic he uses again and again throughout this book: he shows the paradoxical, self-defeating implications of the thinker's ideas for the thinker's own thought. Thus he notes that central to Kuhn's "vision of science is the claim that all observations are imbued with theoretical elements and therefore that the theory-observation distinction is untenable. But Kuhn himself confidently supports his case by pointing to his observations of the history of science" (38). "There is," Dasenbrock observes, "therefore a dissonance between Kuhn's stated position on the status of scientific observation and his own practice as an observer of science" (39). Dasenbrock reports that "Kuhn's work has not become paradigmatic for philosophers of science in the way it has for literary theorists, and the dominant response of analytic philosophers to Kuhn's work has been to see it as self-contradictory and selfrefuting" (39). This is important for two reasons: first, because Kuhn's arguments resemble the arguments of many highly influ-

3 400 BEN JONSON JOURNAL ential literary theorists; and, second, because the arguments Dasenbrock employs against Kuhn are very similar to the ones he uses against such literary theorists themselves. Dasenbrock repeatedly shows how often the positions of influential theorists lead to self-contradiction. Thus he traces the history of various highly contentious debates in order to argue that the existence of such disagreement shows that there is nothing compelling about the intellectual consensus at any given time. The fact of intellectual disagreement is a devastating criticism of the stress on the social explanation of what counts as truth in the work of Kuhn, Rorty, and Fish. Rorty's definition of the community he is a member of is broad, "Western culture," but the diversity of views held in Western culture at any one time, let alone through time, shows that a community defined so broadly does not compel Rorty or anyone else to hold certain beliefs... [Moreover, as] we multiply the number of microcommunities divided by different beliefs,... the community whose beliefs are supposed to shape us increasingly loses the formative role assigned it because it seems to be increasingly something we have chosen among a spectrum of such choices... [In addition, when] we engage in argument, when we try to persuade someone that our views are correct, the very act of engaging in that activity commits us to a belief in truth beyond simply that of the views our community accepts. (43-44) In support of his views, Dasenbrock draws on the arguments of the philosopher Hillary Putnam: When faced with such claims as Rorty's, Putnam wants us to ask this simple question: is the statement that no statement in the humanities possesses noncontingent or acontextual truthvalue itself a contingent statement, tied to its occasion of utterance and without truth-value outside that form of life? Is the claim that there is no objective truth itself put forward as if it xoere objectively true? If these claims are presented as non-contingent, then they are sharply and viciously self-contradictory; if they are presented as contingent, then they have no force for those who choose not to join the community who believes in them. Unpersuaded by these claims whether they are taken to

4 Book Reviews 401 be contingent or noncontingent, Putnam chooses not to join that community. His choice reminds us that we too have a choice; because it cannot be an objective truth that there are no objective truths, we, too, are free to embrace or reject this view. (47; emphasis added) Putnam, though, is not the only major analytic philosopher whom Dasenbrock enlists in his cause. He also draws, even more significantly, on the work of Donald Davidson. Once more extended quotation seems the best way to convey both the clarity and the force of Dasenbrock's writing: Kuhn's language of incommensurability implies that we can never fully understand another's conceptual scheme or paradigm, and Davidson's rejoinder is simply to ask how it is that we know this or can know it. To say that someone's beliefs are unknowably different from our own is to imply that we know what those beliefs are and therefore know them to be different and unknowable. Therefore, any claim to have described or even perceived a different conceptual scheme implies the very translatability the [Kuhnian] claim denies... Thus, Kuhn and others who have stressed the linguisticality of scientific explanation want to have it both ways: other schemes are unknowably different from our own, but these scholars also know or can know what the other schemes are. (49) Dasenbrock's use of both Putnam and Davidson amounts to a kind of philosophical one-two punch: Davidson's critique of Kuhn is thus quite different from Putnam's. Putnam is bothered by Kuhn's miraculous ability to stand above and survey interpretive communities despite his claim that no one can be above such communities... Davidson's break with Kuhn is more radical: he denies that the concept of such communities enables us to explain anything significant about how we communicate... [W]e cannot speak of incommensurable differences separating communities, nor can we speak of membership in a community as entailing any specific set of beliefs. There is always overlap across community boundaries, no matter how they are defined; moreover, the

5 402 BEN JONSON JOURNAL very differences we hope to explain by positing membership in different communities can be explained just as easily as functions of membership in other, shared communities. (50) Having dealt at length with Kuhn (because Kuhn is a "paradigmatic" figure in more senses than one), Dasenbrock now turns to Jacques Derrida. He shows, quite interestingly, how many ideas Derrida shares with Davidson, but he also argues that "one can accept Derrida's critique of received theories of meaning virtually in toto without accepting what he would put in [their] place" (66). Dasenbrock makes a crucial distinction between the ideas of such thinkers as Kuhn, Derrida, and Fish (on the one hand) and those of Davidson (on the other). Whereas the former tend to see linguistic conventions as prison cells from which we can never really escape, Davidson offers a way out:... the scene of interpretation for Davidson is... a scene of learning. We learn when we interpret because the interpreter is not imprisoned in a circle of his or her beliefs. The final crucial point about Davidsonian interpretation is its stress on how the interpreter changes, adapts, or learns in the encounter with the anomalous. In short, [in any interpretive encounter] we assume similarity but inevitably encounter difference. The encounter with difference, however, is productive, not frustrating, because it causes change in the interpretive system of the interpreter... Interpretations are not always self-confirming; interpreters do not always produce interpretations utterly consistent with their prior beliefs and theories; theories are sometimes adjusted to fit experience rather than vice versa. If this were not the case, our interpretations would never change, but change they do, as we change and refine our theories in accord with our changing experience. For Davidson, the purpose of interpretation is simple: to understand others. Only if we posit this as a purpose is it at all important to consider whether one's interpretation has been successful in grasping the intended meaning of others. (75-76, 80) One of the most trenchant portions of Dasenbrock's book is the chapter in which he discusses at length the writings of Jacques Derrida, especially his writings involving the brouhaha that erupted when it was discovered, after the death of Derrida's friend

6 Book Revieivs 403 Paul de Man, that de Man, during World War II, had written for an allegedly pro-nazi newspaper. This matter would not rise above the level of ad hominem argument if Dasenbrock were not able so successfully to show that "many of de Man's colleagues, friends, and former students set out to defend him against these charges... through means utterly inconsistent with any tenets of deconstruction as outlined by Derrida or practiced by Paul de Man" (93). Dasenbrock draws similar conclusions from other famous moments in Derrida's career, particularly his determined efforts to uphold copyright restrictions on his writing. Dasenbrock contends that Derrida's practice (as opposed to his theory) leads repeatedly to several related assumptions: First, no author can regard his or her own writing as unauthored in the way poststructuralist theory suggests. We read differently when our own work is involved. Second, what Derrida's (and other critics') responses to the "de Man affair" show is that we cannot view texts written by people we know in the way deconstructive theory suggests we should even though we may be able to read other texts in that way... [T]here must be something wrong with a theory if even its inventors cannot live by it... The inconsistency I find revealed in deconstruction by Derrida's responses and by the de Man controversy is that deconstruction is reserved for "the other people," more precisely, for texts not written by persons we recognize and value... [T]he choice of anti-intentionalism as a mode of reading involves an ethical choice: a choice to treat the work under discussion as [an impersonal] text, not a work [written by an individual author], as the product of a person not in significant relation to oneself, a person one feels free to ignore. (102,104) Having observed the inconsistencies that seem inherent both in the theories and in the practices of Kuhn, Derrida, and others, Dasenbrock next turns to the work of Althusser, Foucault, and the New Historicists. Typically, he provides an exceptionally clear summary of both his past and prospective arguments:... if deconstruction is vitiated by its inconsistent position on intentionality, the conventionalism I began by describing [i.e., that of Kuhn, et al.] is vitiated by its inconsistent position of

7 404 BEN JONSON JOURNAL truth. For conventionalism, it is absolutely, noncontingently true that there is no absolute, noncontingent truth, and this inconsistency creates an incoherence at the heart of conventionalism different from but just as disabling as the incoherence at the heart of deconstruction. In my view, Foucault's work is inconsistent and therefore incoherent in both of these senses, sharing both Derrida's incoherent anti-intentionalist theory of meaning and Kuhn's incoherent antiobjectivist theory of truth, whereas Althusser's work shows a perhaps too costly way that poststructuralist theories of meaning and truth can be saved from these inconsistencies. (110) Dasenbrock explains at length the alleged inconsistencies in Foucault's work, remarking in a typically pungent sentence, "Anyone claiming that any of Foucault's positions are true must deal with the fact that he as much as Rorty thinks that objective truth is a mirage" (115). He suggests that Foucault's own comments on the inescapability of "discursive formations" make it difficult to explain the status of Foucault's insights into these discursive formations. If discourse works the way Foucault says it does, then how can he see and describe the things he does? Are Foucault's own statements ones he is forced to produce by his society? If so, then their validity and challenge to the established order seem compromised by this complicity with power. If they somehow stand outside this discursive economy of domination, then not all descriptions of truth are produced by the society in which they are made. If Foucault himself can stand outside the discursive system of his time, then why are all others, particularly those in other societies and other times, incapable of this? How can he opt out of the tyranny of discursive formations if no one else can? Even if we give him license to do so, invoking perhaps a Romantic sense of genius, how can others employ his concepts without forming a new tyrannical discursive formation of their own?... if Foucault's reliance on the concept of the episteme [i.e., the mindset of a given era] is specific to and a consequence of his particular episteme, then how can its descriptions of other

8 Book Reviews 405 epistemes be anything more than one episteme's view of another? (115-17) Passages such as this illustrate both the logical and the rhetorical force so often displayed in Dasenbrock's book. Particularly interesting is Dasenbrock's assertion that it is Althusser, rather than Foucault, who actually exercises a more potent (if less trumpeted) influence in literary studies these days partly because Althusser offers a theory of group agency: individuals act merely as representatives of classes and/or ideologies (124). Dasenbrock's consideration of Althusser inevitably leads him back to Marx, and it also leads him to offer the following shrewd comments: The recent "historical" or "social" turn taken by literary studies has been sustained by a remarkably restricted diet of social and political thinkers. Where we have looked to other disciplines, we have looked again for confirmation, not critique. We have tended not to engage with other disciplines at all, but rather to focus on certain key historical figures taken out of their disciplinary contexts. Theorists have read Foucault's Dz'scipline and Punish without wondering what someone in criminal justice might make of it. Theorists have read Freud, but have not engaged with the contemporary discipline of psychology, which is not at all Freudian. Likewise, we have read Marx, but have not engaged with the contemporary discipline of economics... In this, we have been true to our own [literary] discipline, because what we do best is focus on a major writer and read his texts and the secondary commentary on them with care and attention but also generally through a single theoretical orientation or prism. Instead of using, say, Northrop Frye to read the plays of Shakespeare as we might once have done, we use the ideas of Lacan to read Freud, those of Althusser to read Marx. (125) Dasenbrock's consideration of Althusser leads to skeptical accounts of the ideas of Stephen Greenblatt and Stanley Fish, as well as to consideration of what he calls "the new thematics" a term he chooses "because this body of work is overwhelmingly oriented toward discussing themes in literary works, themes that overwhelmingly have to do with groups and communities" (137). Here

9 406 BEN JONSON JOURNAL again Dasenbrock notes various ironies and contradictions in the movements he describes, as when he writes as follows: Despite the fact that diversity is a master term in the new thematic criticism, diversity of perspective among those belonging to a given group is not particularly valued. A minority or postcolonial writer who does not strike the right note is mercilessly castigated in terms reminiscent of Marxist critiques of class traitors... More important, this system of perceiving writers as either bearers of a group identity or betrayers of it produces an oddly dichotomous criticism unresponsive to the real complexities of discourse... There can be interpretive disputes over how a given writer articulates with the overarching categories, but the categories themselves are firmly in place and not subject to critique. (140-42). Ultimately Dasenbrock argues that to "see writers only as representatives of larger collective groups, define those groups as you will, is to reduce the number of questions we can bring to these writers and their works and thus to impoverish not to enrich literary criticism" (147). Even so, in a fashion typical of his intellectual honesty, Dasenbrock does concede the potential value of such thematic approaches a potential he finds lacking in some other recent schools of thought (148-50). He nonetheless argues that "a method predicated on group intentions, which denies recourse to individual intentions, is not as well equipped to interpret the anomalous, the individual who breaks with the discursive regularities or conventions already in place, the person who does not quite fit in the group" (151). Having spent the first half of his book reviewing and critiquing the theories of interpretation that have recently received widest attention (at least in literary studies), Dasenbrock spends the second half making a strong case for a version of interpretation that heavily emphasizes the importance of a writer's intentions. Typically and usefully, he begins by distinguishing his own approach from the views of others: Against the positive intentionalism of E. D. Hirsch who finds intentions useful in establishing the validity of hypotheses and against the universal intentionalism of Stanley Fish who finds no methodological use for intentions, the intentionalism I ad-

10 Book Reviews 407 vocate can be called negative or disconfirmationalist because the primary use for intentions in my thinking is to question or challenge or disprove hypotheses about meaning. We add little if anything to an interpretive claim when we claim that we have found the author's intentions; on this point, Fish and I are in agreement. But faced with an interpretive claim we find unpersuasive, the counterclaim that the claim could not possibly be what the author meant has considerably more power and bite. (170) Readers will here recognize (and Dasenbrock fully acknowledges) the influence of Karl Popper, and indeed it is typical of the sophistication of Dasenbrock's approach that he is aware of both the strengths and the vulnerabilities of Popper's thinking (171). He therefore supplements Popper's ideas with views taken from Davidson, and his patient unraveling of Davidsonian interpretive procedures (171-74) is quite persuasive. One of the most memorable passages in the book, however, reflects Dasenbrock's ability to explain matters in language that is (to quote the title of an important recent book) as "simple and clear as the truth": We need to extend this presumption of intentionality to the objects of interpretation because interpretation focuses on objects produced by human beings with intentions in so acting. We do not interpret mountains or sunsets or intriguing rock formations; we interpret things made by human persons, by human agents. We have ignored this seemingly obvious fact for a generation, leaving us with an impoverished language for addressing the intentionality of the works of art we interpret. (174) Many readers of Dasenbrock's book are likely to find his comments on pedagogy on the ways recent trends in literary theory and interpretation tend to affect classroom practice especially intriguing. Thus he comments that The first problem is that conventionalism writes the classroom as it writes everything else, as a place of certainties rather than uncertainties, and this does not allow for the hesitant, uncertain, doubtful nature of our experience of literature and of learning itself. The second problem, related to the first, is that

11 408 BEN JONSON JOURNAL agency in a conventionalist classroom can only be dyadic: only two forces can interact, the teacher and the students. The literature classroom, more properly understood, is triadic: it is not just a place where a teacher and a group of students encounter one another, it is also where they encounter a text or a work... [W]e spend time with a work of art if we think we have more to learn about it, not if we have come to a confident, fixed interpretation of it. [For Dasenbrock], the most important reason to read and to study literature [is] to break out of our own circle of beliefs and assumptions and to encounter another point of view. (203 4, 206-7) The sentence quoted last will sound naive only to readers who take conventionalism more seriously than Dasenbrock does. Indeed, one of the most valuable aspects of this portion of his book is his discussion of how such moments of learning, such real encounters with another person through a text, are not only possible but indeed almost inevitable. Here he draws on the theoretical work not only of Davidson but of Hans-George Gadamer, although he also makes a strong case for preferring the former to the latter. This is because, for Davidson, the difference between two persons engaged in dialogue, or between a reader and a text, "is not just a problem to be overcome; it is also an opportunity, an opportunity to learn, to adapt, to change" (211). Dasenbrock's concern with pedagogy leads him to discuss canon formation, another important issue in contemporary literary theory. Once again his remarks are both cautionary and illuminating, especially when he discusses the impasses to which contemporary sociological approaches tend to lead, and also when he explains why ethical choices (and, yes, even aesthetic decisions) are always likely to be crucial in determining what, why, and how we read. His critique of Pierre Bourdieu shows not only his close familiarity with the latest French trends but also his healthy skepticism about them. He also returns in this chapter to an extended discussion of Barbara Herrnstein Smith's views on evaluation, arguing in his time-tested way that they tend toward self-contradiction. Anyone familiar with Dasenbrock's work in practical criticism will know that his credentials as a multiculturalist are extremely strong: he has done as much as anyone to help broaden and deepen the contemporary canon. His concern, then, is not with

12 Book Reviews 409 preserving the status quo ante but with helping to ensure that literary study remains, in large part, the study of literature rather than a reflection of passing sociological trends. Dasenbrock's final chapter illustrates once more how skillfully his book manages to balance its discussion of theory with a concern for quite practical matters. Thus, in the course of critiquing the ideas of Jean-Francois Lyotard, he also shows how the influence of postmodern and poststructuralist thinking has helped lead to a steady deterioration of the place of literary study not only in the university but in society at large. Recent theory, he maintains, has had a largely self-defeating effect on (and in) the humanities a contention that would be less disturbing if Dasenbrock had not already made a highly persuasive case that recent theory is largely unconvincing. It is one thing to go valiantly down with the ship; it is another thing altogether if the ship was never sea-worthy in the first place. Dasenbrock's book is, in short, one of the most important contributions to literary theory of the last thirty years. His arguments are reasoned, patient, thorough, and copiously annotated; unlike some critics of postmodern or poststructuralist thought, he has actually taken the time to study the thinkers he criticizes, and he makes one of the most comprehensive, clear, and careful cases ever presented against their ideas and influence. This is a book that both supporters and skeptics of recent trends will need to know. It is a book that can be highly recommended both to serious undergraduates and graduate students and to veterans alike. Most important, it is a book that not only finds flaws in the thinking of others but also suggests ways out of our current impasse. It suggests a reasoned, sensible approach not only to the study of literature but to any kind of interpretation whatsoever. Robert C. Evans Auburn University at Montgomery