PromisesXPromises

Disclaimer: This is an exercise in what could very fairly be termed "bluffing" (or, promising?). I have not (yet!) read Derrida, Austin, or Felman, and therefore must draw my knowledge of these thinkers from superficial, textbook-style treatments (in the case of Derrida) and from Fortun's text itself (in the cases of Austin and Felman). Of course, as any goodXbad student knows, not having read the book does not prohibit one from writing about it; indeed, in light of this post's engagement with language and promising, it would seem impossible to do otherwise.

Near the beginning of Chapter X, Fortun notes that he has "preferred, throughout this text, to defer direct theorizing of promising, relying instead on the inferences that ethnographic empiricism offers, or at least promises." (104) Nevertheless, in this chapter Fortun finds a place for "some promise of theory" -- a move that, as I hope to show, occurs less by choice than by necessity (or rather, by choiceXnecessity), given Fortun's previous situation of his text in relation to the work of Jacques Derrida.

As early as chapter one, Derrida is invoked as the foundation of Fortun's investigation of promising. In this formulation, promising is not localized or tied to any specific object, event, or meaning. This allows Fortun to grasp the nebulous nature of promises, but it also significantly destabilizes Fortun's object of study. If promising is rooted in the Derridean conception of language as an infinite chain of signifiers, then it is impossible to speak (pardon the pun) of a promise as "fulfilled". Worse yet, it is impossible to know when and/or if a promise has been made.

But how then to study promises? If every attempt to "pin down" a promise merely results in displacement, isn't the attempt to study promises futile? Doesn't the infinite displacement of meaning render Fortun's text meaningless? In other words, the problem of nihilism: "However will we make judgements?!" (110)

Fortun's answer is a chiasmic nonXanswer. In Felman's terms, Fortun plays the devil. That is to say: Fortun is unwilling to "pin down" the status of his own text (and of his own "distanceXcomplicity") within the bounds of any normative logic. Rather, the text is rooted in a radical negativity (one that, I might add, sounds strikingly similar to Žižek's reading of Hegel, as rendered in his pop culture-tinged dialectic of "living, dead, and undead" -- i.e. "positive, negative, and the negation of the negative") that is fundamentally scandalous in that such a radical negativity "cannot be assimilated by historical or ethnographic understanding" and yet still "constitute[s] historical and ethnographic understanding." (111)

Thus, the use of Derrida drives Fortun to acknowledge that his text mirrors his object of study; just as promises are nebulous (scandalously so) and outside the bounds of normative logic, so is Fortun's endeavor. (This is why, sooner or later, Fortun must engage Derrida et al on a theoretical level.) Fortun's study is empirical -- rooted in facts. The phonograph needle is still there, somewhat. But the study is also fictional. The phonograph needle is playing back moreXless than it recorded. Empirical and fictional. The text is a nonXfiction.

(And a nonXfiction is precisely what Fortun provides at the end of the chapter. The final segment, accompanied by a drastic change in tone, can be seen as a microcosm of Fortun's theoretical commitments. But that would be a whole other blog post.)