The Deconstructive Angel (Meyer H.

Abrams, 1912-)

Critical philosopher and cultural historian. Abrams received HA, MA and Ph.D. from
Harvard and has taught since 1945 at Cornell, He is known for the editorship of The
Norton Anthology of English Literature, for his contribution to literary history
and history of ideas in The Mirror and the Lamp (1953) and, to the delight of the
literature students, for A Glossary of Literary Terms (1971). Abrams writings
display well his breadth of knowledge, as exemplified in the following essay
(1971), a response to "a tendency in contemporary American criticism toward
ideological monism as well as to deprecating the usefulness of knowledge of the
intellectual tradition of East and West (the socalled canon) and questioning the
virtues of pluralistic humanism. "

It is often said that Derrida and those who follow his lead subordinate all
inquiries to a prior inquiry into language. This is true enough, but not specific
enough, for it does not distinguish Derrida's work from what Richard Rorty calls
"the linguistic turn" which characterizes modern Anglo-American philosophy and also
a great part of Anglo-American literary criticism, including the "New Criticism,"
of the last half-century. What is distinctive about Derrida is first that, like
other French structuralists, he shifts his inquiry from language to ecriture, the
written or printed text; and second that he conceives a test in an extraordinarily
limited fashion.

Derrida's initial and decisive strategy is to disestablish the priority, in

traditional views of languages, of speech over writing. By priority I mean the use
of oral discourse as the conceptual model from which to derive the semantic and
other features of written language and of language in general. And Derrida's shift
of elementary reference is to a written text which consists of what we find when we
look at it — to "un texte deja ecrit, noir sur blanc. " In the dazzling play of
Derrida's expositions, his ultimate recourse is to these black marks on white paper
as the sole things that arc actually present in reading, and so are not fictitious
constructs, illusions, phantasms; the visual features of these black-on-blanks he
expands in multiple
dimensions of elaborately figurative significance, only to contract them again, at
telling moments, to their elemental status. The only things that are patently there
when we look at the text arc "marks" that are demarcated, and separated into
groups, by " blanks;" there are also "spaces," "margins," and the "repetitions" and
"differences" that we find when we compare individual marks and groups of marks. By
his rhetorical mastery Derrida solicits us to follow him in his move to these new
premises, and to allow ourselves to be locked into them. This move is from what he
calls the closed "logocentric" model of all traditional or "classical" views of
language (which, he maintains, is based on the illusion of a Platonic or Christian
transcendent being or presence, serving as the origin and guarantor of meanings) to
what 1 shall call his own graphocentric model, in which the sole presences are
marks-on-blanks.

By this bold move Derrida puts out of play, before the game even begins, every
source of norms, controls, or indicators which, in the ordinary use and experience
of language, set a limit to what we can mean and what we can be understood to mean.
Since the only givens are already-existing marks, "deja ecrit," we are denied
recourse to a speaking or writing subject, or ego, or cogito, or consciousness, and
so to any possible agency for the intention of meaning something ("vouloir dire");
all such agencies are relegated to the status of fictions generated by language,
readily dissolved by deconstructivc analysis. By this move he leaves us no place
for referring to how we learn to speak, understand, or read language, and how, by
interaction with more competent users and by our own developing experience with
language, we come to recognize and correct our mistakes in speaking or
understanding. The author is translated by Derrida (when he's not speaking in the
momentary shorthand of traditional fictions) to a status as one more mark among
other marks, placed at the head or the end of a text or set of texts, which are
denominated as "bodies of work identified according to the "proper name' of a
signature." Even syntax, the organization of words into a significant sentence, is
given no role in determining the meanings of component words, for according to the
graphocentric model, when we look at a page we sec no organization but only a
"chain" of grouped marks, a sequence of individual signs.
It is the notion of "the sign" that allows Derrida a limited opening out of his
premises. For he brings to a text the knowledge that the marks on a page are not
random markings, but signs, and that a sign has a dual aspect as signifier and
signified, signal and concept, or mark-withmeaning. But these meanings, when we
look at a page, are not there, either as physical or mental presences. To account
for significance, Derrida turns to a highly specialized and elaborated use of
Saussure's notion that the identity cither of the sound or of the signification of
a sign does not consist in a positive attribute, but in a negative (or relational)
attribute — this is, its "difference," or differentiability, from other sounds and
other significations within a particular linguistic system. This notion of
difference is readily available to Derrida, because inspection of the printed page
shows that some marks and sets of marks repeat each other, but that others differ
from each other. In Derrida's theory "difference" — not "the difference between a
and b and c..." but simply "difference" in itself — supplements the static elements
of a text with an essential operative term, and as such (somewhat in the fashion of
the term "negativity" in the dialectic of Hegel) it performs prodigies. For
"difference" puts into motion the incessant play (jeu) of signification that goes
on within the seeming immobility of the marks on the printed page.

To account for what is distinctive in the signification of a sign, Derrida puts

forward the term "trace," which he says is not a presence, though it functions as a
kind of "simulacrum" of a signified presence. Any signification that difference has
activated in a signifier in the past remains active as a "trace" in the present
instance as it will in the future, and the "sedimentation" of traces which a
signifier has accumulated constitutes the diversity in the play of its present
significations. This trace is an elusive aspect of a text which is not, yet
functions as though it were; it plays a role without being "present;" it "appears/
disappears;" "in presenting itself it effaces itself." Any attempt to define or
interpret the significance of a sign or chain of signs consists in nothing more
than the interpreter's putting in its place another sign or chain of signs, "sign-
substitutions," whose self-effacing traces merely defer laterally, from
substitution to substitution, the fixed and present meaning (or the signified
"presence") we vainly pursue. The promise that the trace seems to offer of a
presence on which the play of signification can come to rest in a determinate
reference is thus never realizable, but
incessantly deferred, put off, delayed. Derrida coins what in French is the
portmanteau term differance. (spelled-ance, and fusing the notions of differing and
deferring) to indicate the endless play of generated significances, in which the
reference is interminably postponed. The conclusion, as Derrida puts it, is that
"the central signified, the originating or transcendental signified" is revealed to
be "never absolutely present outside a system of differences," and this "absence of
an ultimate signified extends the domain and play of signification to infinity. "

What Derrida's conclusion comes to is that no sign or chain of signs can have a
determinate meaning. But it seems to me that Derrida reaches this conclusion by a
process which, in its own way, is no less dependent on an origin, ground, and end,
and which is no less remorselessly "ideological," than the most rigorous of the
metaphysical systems that he uses his conclusions to deconstruct. His origin and
ground are his graphocentric premises, the closed chamber of texts for which he
invites us to abandon our ordinary realm of experience in speaking, hearing,
reading, and understanding language. And from such a beginning we move to a
foregone conclusion. For Derrida's chamber of texts is a sealed echo-chamber in
which meanings arc reduced to a ceaseless echolalia, a vertical and lateral
reverberation from sign to sign of ghostly nonpresences emanating from no voice,
intended by no one, referring to nothing, bombinating in a void.

For the mirage of traditional interpretation, which vainly undertakes to determine

what an author meant, Derrida proposes the alternative that we deliver ourselves
over to a free participation in the infinite free-play of signification opened out
by the signs in a text. And on this cheerless prospect of language and the cultural
enterprise in ruins Derrida bids us to try to gaze, not with a Rousseauistic
nostalgia for a lost security as to meaning which we never in fact possessed, but
instead with "a Nietzschean affirmation, the joyous affirmation of the play of the
world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without
error [faute] without truth, without origin, which is offered to an active
interpretation.... And it plays without security ... .In absolute chance,
affirmation also surrenders itself to genetic indeterminacy, to the seminal
chanciness [aventure] of the trace." The graphocentric premises
eventuate in what is patently a metaphysics, a world-view of the free and unceasing
play of differance which (since we can only glimpse this world by striking free of
language, which inescapably implicates the entire metaphysics of presence that this
view replaces) we are not able even to name. Derrida's vision is thus, as he puts
it, of an "as yet unnamable something which cannot announce itself except... under
the species of a non-species, under the formless form, mute, infant, and
terrifying, of monstrosity."

Study Questions

1. This is an early attack on Derrida, marked by misunderstandings and

misrepresentations, in spite of some brilliant criticism of deconstruction. Comment
on Abrams' position. 2. What does Abrams mean when he says that Derrida "leaves us
no place for referring to how we learn to speak, understand, or read language?" 3.
The essay is a defense of traditional criticism and the principles of moral
philosophy. Are you sympathetic with Abrams in this respect?

Further Reading:

Abrams, M. H. "The Deconstructive Angel." Critical Inquiry. No. 3, Spring 1977

Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983 de Man,
Paul. Blindness and Insight. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983
Derrida, Jacques. Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1972 —
Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York & London: Routledge, J992 Ehrmann.
Jacques ed. Structuralism. New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., J970 Felperin,
Howard. Beyond Deconstruction — the Uses and Abuses of Literary Theory. New York:
Oxford UP, 1985 Fisher, Michael. Does Deconstruction Make Any Difference? Post-
structuralism and the Defense of Poetry in Modern Criticism. Bloomington: Indiana
UP, 1985 Hawkes, Terence Structuralism and Semiotics. Berkeley & Los Angles: U of
California P, 1977 Heidegger, Martin. " Hoderlin and the Essence of Poetry" (1951).
In Adams & Searle eds. Critical Theory Since 1965 Fredric Jameson. The Prison-House
of Language, A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism. Princeton &
London: Princeton UP, 1972 Leitch, B. Vincent. Deconstructive Criticism, An
Advanced Introduction. New York: Columbia UP, J983 Morris, Christopher.
Deconstruction: Theory and Practice. London &New York: Methuen, 1982 Sturrock,
John. Structuralism. London: Paladin Grafton Books, 1986 Trotsky, Leon. "Literature
and Revolution", in Adams, Hazard ed., Critical Theory Since Plato, Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, Inc., New York, 1971 White, Hayden. "The Absurdist Moment in
Contemporary Literary Theory." In Murray Krieger & L. S. Dembo eds. Directions for
Criticism, Structuralism and Its Alternatives. The U of Wisconsin P, 1977 Wolin,
Richard. The Terms of Cultural Criticism. New York: Columbia UP, 1992