Body and Story: The Ethics and Practice of Theoretical Conflict

5 The Enlightenment Discovers Postmodernism

C H A P T E R F I V E The Enlightenment Discovers Postmodernism Nothing . . . may seem more unbounded than the thought of man, which not only escapes all human power and authority, but is not even restrained within the limits of nature and reality. . . . Thought can in an instant transport us to the most distant regions of the universe, or even beyond the universe . — HUME, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, sec. 2, 65 Freedom in thought has only pure thought as its truth, a truth lacking the fullness of life. Hence freedom in thought . . . is only the Notion of freedom , not the living reality of freedom itself. — G.W.F. HEGEL, Phenomenology of Spirit, 122 Toute action de l’esprit est aisée si elle n’est pas soumise au réel. [The activities of our mind are effortless so long as they are not obliged to answer to the real.] — PROUST, Sodome et Gomorrhe II, À la recherche du temps perdu, 3:51 In the last century there were philosophers who argued that nothing exists but ideas. In our century there are people who write as if there were nothing but texts. — RORTY, Consequences of Pragmatism, 139 Our story so far: in the Enlightenment stories were changing. They played with shucking off bodies, but the game ended in a labyrinth. The truth-status of narrative, the pragmatics of language, the density and the self-evidence of materiality , all began to seem more and more problematic. These fundamental registers of human beings’ comprehension of the world appeared to be readjusting , seemed to be trying to reframe their character, their capacities, and their relationship in order to accommodate some powerful new determinants. The principal determinants were two. First, the reformist intentions of the philosophes could only be realized through practices of language. Other modalities of public activity and political action were blocked by the same absolu- 114 The Conflict of Theories tist strictures that Enlightenment thinkers were programmatically stigmatizing and seeking to destabilize. So a newer puzzlement inherent in words’ capacity for material agency was counterposed against language’s own internal perplexities , compounding the enigma. Second, European society’s growing urbanization , internal differentiation, and socioeconomic complexity were requiring signs to learn and to play extended roles in order to accommodate unprecedented augmentations and complications in economic and information exchange . The increasing impalpability of fundamental social, cultural, and economic entities opened many questions. These changes defamiliarized the accustomed scope and character of linguistic and semiotic practices. Language began to seem strange not only in its ability to take on these augmented tasks but particularly in its capacity to stand in for materiality while at the same time traducing materiality’s most constitutive quality, the constraining and refractory weight of things. Despite (and because of) their impalpability, diverse forms of language—particularly narrative and commercial fictions—began increasingly to substitute for matter. The phase-change such substitution entailed seemed uncanny; such practices thwarted comprehension. This is the background against which I have sought to place Diderot’s interrogation of the displacement of bodies by language. And I have been suggesting that these inflections and interrogations can help illuminate theoretical choices and quarrels today. To pursue his narrative and conceptual reflection, Diderot composed a series of conspicuously odd stories. They explored language’s and materiality’s exchanges and metamorphoses. Over several decades Diderot revised and ruminated on his tales and the questions they raised and tested them against other modes of his writing. The tales he fashioned seemed to enact a gleeful effacement of the real, but one that unsettled him. The pull of these stories in the direction of corporeality’s dematerialization is a dynamic we’re familiar with today. Its horizon is the enticing fantasy that with language you can do whatever you want—that language is what is. Yet, despite this challenge arising in his own writing experience and practice, Diderot maintained allegiance to a materialism that sought to centralize in the seeming impalpability of discourse the foundational characteristics of human corporeality and vulnerability. In our own period, over the past few decades several waves of reflection have centered upon the character and functioning of language: on its capacity for truth and, conversely, on its propensity for fabrication. These reflections have naturalized an elegant—but, I will argue, a problematic—resolution of Diderot’s The Enlightenment Discovers Postmodernism 115 perplexity concerning the veridicality and the lability of...