Page 53 - Critical and Cultural Theory

LANGUAGE AND INTERPRETATION
language, with devices that unsettle consistency and logic. Critical
theory has accordingly been opposed because of its involvement
with literature and writing in general, and because of its own use
of tropes. Both literature and theory have been used as scapegoats,
assumed to carry all the sins (displacement, dissimulation, the
perversion of logic) which are actually relentlessly committed by
language in each and every form. The resistance to theory', de
Man states, 'is a resistance to the rhetorical or tropological dimen-
sion of language' (de Man 1988: 368). Traditional scholars resist
the rhetorical side of human discourse - and hence of theories
committed to exposing that side - because they wish to hold onto
the myth of an undistorted and undistorting language. Yet, it
cannot be denied that rhetoric enters our lives the moment we
utter a word - the moment, that is, an abstract symbol comes to
.
replace a physical object: 'It would be unfortunate .. to confuse
the materiality of the signifier with the materiality of what it
.
signifies .. no one in his right mind will try to grow grapes by the
luminosity of the word "day"' (de Man 1988: 362).
In Allegories of Reading, de Man focuses on the relationship
between rhetoric and grammar. While it is necessary to draw a
distinction between the two, it is nonetheless the case that rhetoric
and grammar tend to cross over into each other. De Man's project
is set against the background of previous critical approaches. Prior
to Formalism and New Criticism, he observes, a text's form was
seen as its superficial outside and its content as the valuable inside
to be discovered. Formalism and New Criticism reversed the
model by viewing content as secondary to form, the text's
meaning coinciding with its handling of rhetorical devices. Here,
content became the outside and form the inside. Both approaches,
for de Man, reduce the text to a 'box', and 'it matters little
whether we call the inside of the box the content or the form' (de
Man 1979: 5). De Man is equally unhappy with the search for
hidden truths and with the study of rhetoric as a body of devices.
Rhetoric, in his opinion, is wherever language can be found. The
role played by rhetoric, moreover, often stands out when it is
assessed in relation to a text's grammatical features.
At times, sentences use a familiar grammatical structure, yet
their meanings are nebulous. We cannot be sure whether they
should be read literally or figuratively. Grammar defines what is
acceptable as a properly formed sentence. However, it cannot tell

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