ABSTRACT
I see, practically and theoretically, the estranging consequences of the general assumption--as active in modernist literature as in theoretical linguistics and structuralist Marxism--that the systems of human signs are generated within the systems themselves and that to think otherwise is a humanist error. There is then a paradox: that these systems, as systematic analysis reveals them, have great explanatory power, but that the form and language of their explanations are at a quite exceptional distance from the lives and relationships they adress, so that what is reaching furthest into our common life has the mode of a stranger, even the profession of a stranger. (Raymond Williams, Writing in Society, 224)
As such, history is not human, because it pertains strictly to the order of language; it is not natural, for the same reason; it is not phenomenal, in the sense that no cognition, no knowledge about man, can be derived from a history which as such is purely a linguistic complication; and it is not really temporal either, because the structure that animates it is not a temporal structure. (paul De Man, "The Task of the Translator," 92)
It is easy to see from the analysis in the preceding chapter that the emphasis on writing as an impersonal act and the discounting of authorial intention are important components of the claims made about the antiideological or self-deconstructing characteristics of literary texts. Beginning with Engels' endorsement of a realism faithful to truth despite the author's personal ideological commitments, continuing in the psychoanalytical overtones of Macherey's attention to what a text cannot
admit about itself, and achieving a fully systematic fonn in the deconstructionist view of rhetoricity as capable of turning every utterance against its apparent or intended meaning, there is a deeply rooted refusal to grant authors or individual speakers an autonomy that would give them control over their own discursive practices. Although this refusal is connected to the process of "saving the text" where literature is shown to defy the ideological and metaphysical intentions that produce it, it would be wrong to see such a refusal as merely a maneuver to attribute subversive functions to literary texts. The critique of the intentional theory of meaning is in fact an essential element of a general eradication of the individual subject in post-structuralist philosophy and criticism. Understanding the basis for this eradication is important because it has implications for the ideological analysis of discourse on several levels.
