[extropy-chat] PHIL: Derrida and Deconstruction

[Damien Broderick]

At 09:46 AM 11/2/2006 -0800, Jef wrote:

>My bottom-line and crude assessment is that postmodernism represents 
>essentially a bottomless pit of navel-gazing, mental masturbation 
>and academic in-fighting.

The last-mentioned is crucial, especially when parsed as 
"ladder-climbing" (into the professoriate). One should not 
underestimate the sheer combative brilliance and mental agility of 
the best deconstructors, the capacity to take a stone and wring not 
just water but sparkling fountains of multi-colored streams from it, 
all without getting wet.

For those who can bear it, here's a bit from my book THEORY AND ITS 
DISCONTENTS, which might convey something of the texture of the process.

Damien Broderick

======

The pun is mightier than the word/s. Don't quibble. (A quibble, the 
dictionary tells us, is a pun. The shortest distance between two puns 
is a straight-line.) Still--and one recalls Steiner's preference for 
author over critic--both New Critic W. K. Wimsat and deconstructor 
Howard Felperin borrow as epigraph this radiant fragment from Kafka:

           "Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs 
what is in the sacrificial pitchers; this is repeated over and over 
again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part 
of the ceremony."

Post-structuralists (especially the patriarchal prophets, hovering 
always on the edge of glossolalia: Lacan, Foucault, Derrida, 
Baudrillard) burst into the temple. They savage the canon. They mark 
it with their reeking urine. They desecrate sheets and signatures. In 
time their terrifying charisma is stolen by bureaucrats, routinised 
and institutionalised (the grinding verbs fill their own forms). Aporia indeed.

Perhaps the most poignant paradox is how conscientious, how 
hard-working and scholarly, these high-wire gamesters are. Are they 
the last of the Protestant-ethic anarchists, tutting at their 
obediently disobedient children cavorting in atrocious disinhibition? 
`By scrutinizing the words on the page harder than new criticism ever 
had,' Felperin writes, `deconstruction discovered not their 
translucent and free-standing autonomy but, in a radical 
defamiliarization, their dark, even opaque, character as writing... 
not the organic unity that binds together irony,
  paradox and ambiguity in a privileged, indeed redeemed and 
redeeming language, but unrecuperable rhetorical discontinuity' (p. 110).

What, practically speaking, does this mean that is not obvious to 
anyone alert to modernist and postmodernist texts, from Brecht to 
Barth, David Caute to (ahem) my own novel Transmitters (1984)? 
Felperin sets out to Show by Doing not Telling, accepting a text 
pawed over in 1980, in a parody of deconstruction, by a hostile Denis 
Donoghue: Robert Frost's `Acquainted with the Night' (Felperin, pp. 115).

Felperin confounds scorn with a learned display in the mode of Harold 
Bloom and Geoffrey Hartman (who, alas, balky Donoghue would not agree 
are the genuine deconstructive article). In the end, a `Derridean' 
reading is essayed (`actually a rewriting of an inspired reading by 
my colleague Dr Simon During... very much a palimpsest of 
intertextuality' [fn. 21, p. 129]) in which Frost's terza rima 
`means' virtually anything but what it says.

           " `I have been one acquainted with the night,' the poem 
confesses, but for During this is a cover-up, and when `an 
interrupted cry... came over houses from another street, /But not to 
call me back or say good-by;' this doubt is confirmed. Frost's text 
is, plainly, refusing the ghosts of unborn, repressed texts: it is, 
at a deeper level, `acquainted with delight'. The cry does not not 
say good-by, but actually not not say `"you'll die" '. And so on. 
`The controlled, formal, fully socialised language of the poem is at 
once concealing and revealing the libidinous energy behind or beneath 
its care and caution... What such a "reading" ultimately deconstructs 
of course is any possible recuperation of the text as a unitary 
utterance' " (p. 128).

Aaron Green, the 46-year-old New York Freudian who Virgils Janet 
Malcolm through her writing of Psychoanalysis: the Impossible 
Profession, made distressing discoveries of his own during training 
analysis. `"Well, I'll be frank. It's the desire to be a beautiful 
woman. You find all kinds of surprises in analysis... It bothered me, 
I can tell you." ' (Malcolm, 1982, p. 57). Felperin's long and quite 
enthralling full-dress analysis of Shakespeare's Sonnets bothered me, 
I can tell you. But just as we dispute with Freud only at the risk of 
unseemly revelations, the reader (I am not trying to get away) stands 
under some pressure to applaud or grin or even yawn in the face of 
such funambulating gymnastics.

Felperin throws out a line at the last instant:

           " `Therefore I lie with her and she with me, /And in our 
faults by lies we flattered be.' The point cannot be made too 
strongly, however, against those textualists and grammatologists who 
would like to proclaim the end of representation, that representation 
does not, because it cannot, cease. What ceases is the dream of 
univocal representation, which now becomes multivocal, in something 
of the way the Roman Empire does not so much cease as become Europe. 
[The deconstructed text arises] from the hyperactivity of the pun... 
generating numerous objective correlatives." (Felperin, p. 197)

Behind and about each poem and fiction, then (but also, presumably, 
shadowing each scientific text as well), drift or loom the shades of 
other texts, just as Saussurean language, deconstructed still further 
by Lacan and Derrida, is made of floating signifiers and sliding 
signifieds. For much of his life, like the elder Newton scratching at 
alchemy and astrology, Ferdinand de Saussure searched the poems of 
antiquity for nominal anagrams he felt certain were secreted there. 
James Thurber's friend Jordon made a similar discovery and kept 
everyone awake all night: `There are lips in pistol /And mist in 
times, /Cats in crystal, /And mice in chimes' (Thurber, 1961, p. 104).

           "What if the poem is always already the writerly 
foreknowledge... of all possible readerly or critical constructions 
or misprisions of it?... These other poems are not, strictly 
speaking, `readings' or interpretations that offer themselves to 
particular critics or poets in particular contexts at particular 
times.... They are other poems that this poem writes and erases in a 
single moment, writes and erases in a moment of fear and desire: fear 
of being what they are, and desire to be what they are." (Felperin, pp. 127 8)

The upshot of this desperate polyphonic ingenuity seems inevitably to 
be an abstention from action or commitment (Marxism and other 
`contextualist' doctrines having been subverted at source by their 
vulnerable status as texts). It is not only `contextualists' who 
collapse under this onslaught, of course; so too do the 
deconstructors themselves. Luckily, theory is at hand with one last 
reversal of expectations. Literary studies is an academic discipline, 
after all, within a certified interpretative community. It must 
`offer its reasons for saying and doing what it does, reasons which 
will be deemed valid or invalid, embraced or rejected, only according 
to the norms of the historical community within which they are 
offered' (Felperin, p. 222).

Remarkable. When the Bakhtinian carnival has left town, those who 
remain turn regretfully from the empty, elephant-dung spattered 
fairground and press their suits for work. While it cannot--despite 
the rear-view mirror of a Las Meninas--give us sight in the 
blindspots of our own episteme (implicit in the social construction 
of our splintered, only-apparently unitary selves), `this counsel of 
liberal scepticism--some would call it pragmatism,' spares us any 
intemperate plunge into `some monistic and overarching theory of 
theories.' The best we can hope for, `beyond deconstruction', is a 
cross-disciplinary Pidgin in which, given the vulgar mercantile 
reality of life, `the new tribe of literacy [sic; literary?] 
theorists, more multinational and entrepreneurial in spirit, will 
negotiate their mergers and puff their products...' (p. 222 3).

Glossolalia has a long tradition in religion and the academy both. An 
innovator makes her mark as much by introducing a fresh lexicon as by 
convincing us of her startling point of view, her barrage of 
surprising evidence. Often this cascade of jargon is altogether 
justified, and cannot be avoided: we think with words, and new words, 
even new syntax, help us to think new things. But that very fact 
makes us vulnerable to its abuse. The generosity we evince toward 
those who offer us a renewed discourse should not be allowed to blur 
into the delirious enthusiasm, captured rather aptly in Mark 
16:17-18, of modish converts: `And these signs shall follow them that 
believe... they shall speak with new tongues... and if they drink any 
deadly thing, it shall not hurt them...' Swallowing a dram of 
Heidegger, Baudrillard and their ululating poststructural followers 
may very easily teach you the use of new tongues but is likely, for 
all that, to leave you (as Althusser's odd Marxism did for many 
theorists a decade or two back) with a nasty hangover.