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IT EMBARRASSES ME initially to realize that I have little more to say than Emerson says in these few words, as he asks us to remember the mystery of our power to think.(1) But it is encouraging to recall Goethe's observation to Eckermann that, properly speaking, our intellectual work lies not so much in thinking new thoughts as in thinking the old ones again (229-30). In speculating on the dynamics of free will and determinism, Emerson asks a question that I aim to direct at contemporary critical practice: What, indeed, is this criticism that pries into the limits within which we find ourselves? Even if, like Emerson, we find ourselves too young by many ages to retire the question, simply returning to it is instructive if that return corrects or refines our practice.
I propose to pursue this rethinking along a rather peculiar via mathematica. In 1931, the mathematician Kurt Godel, then in Vienna, published a short logical treatise consisting of two theorems, now often referred to in the singular as Godel's incompleteness theorem, and two corresponding proofs.(2) Since its appearance, Godel's work has received attention in contexts as various as artificial intelligence, literary deconstruction, postmodern cultural theory, and logic and the philosophy of mathematics, and it has become a common reference (if usually a passing one) in all these fields. Jean-Francois Lyotard, for example, cites Godel's theorem as an illustrative parallel to those modern conditions that necessitate "a reformulation of the question of the legitimation of knowledge" (43). Simple interpretations of the theorem's significance inevitably distort the details to some degree, but I begin with such a capsule statement from George Steiner: "no axiomatic system can ever be proved to be fully coherent and consistent from within its own rules and postulates" (125).
At first sight, the theorem's implications might seem rather congenial to current thinking in the academy, for when Godel affirms the inescapability of self-reflexive regress and of incompleteness in signification, he affirms two virtually universal tenets of postmodern criticism.(3) My aim here, however, is to complicate this familiar association, suggesting that a closer-than-passing familiarity with Godel's theorem can help launch some clearly focused and critical questions about much literary theory of the last few decades, especially that theory called deconstruction. These...