Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Monday, May 12, 2008

 
Stanley Fish reinterprets Derrida:

"What was involved was less the rejection of the rationalist tradition than an interrogation of its key components: an independent, free-standing, knowing subject, the "I" facing an independent, free-standing world. The problem was how to get the "I" and the world together, how to bridge the gap that separated them ever since the older picture of a universe everywhere filled with the meanings God originates and guarantees had ceased to be compelling to many... both the "I" or the knower, and the world that is to be known, are themselves not themselves, but the unstable products of mediation, of the very discursive, linguistic forms that in the rationalist tradition are regarded as merely secondary and instrumental. The "I" or subject, rather than being the free-standing originator and master of its own thoughts and perceptions, is a space traversed and constituted — given a transitory, ever-shifting shape — by ideas, vocabularies, schemes, models, distinctions that precede it, fill it and give it (textual) being.

The Cartesian trick of starting from the beginning and thinking things down to the ground can’t be managed because the engine of thought, consciousness itself, is inscribed (written) by discursive forms which "it" (in quotation marks because consciousness absent inscription is empty and therefore non-existent) did not originate and cannot step to the side of no matter how minimalist it goes. In short (and this is the kind of formulation that drives the enemies of French theory crazy), what we think with thinks us. It also thinks the world. This is not say that the world apart from the devices of human conception and perception doesn’t exist "out there"; just that what we know of that world follows from what we can say about it rather than from any unmediated encounter with it in and of itself. This is what Thomas Kuhn meant in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions when he said that after a paradigm shift — after one scientific vocabulary, with its attendant experimental and evidentiary apparatus, has replaced another — scientists are living in a different world; which again is not to say (what it would be silly to say) that the world has been altered by our descriptions of it; just that only through our descriptive machineries do we have access to something called the world.

This may sound impossibly counterintuitive and annoyingly new-fangled, but it is nothing more or less than what Thomas Hobbes said 300 years before deconstruction was a thought in the mind of Derrida or Heidegger: "True and false are attributes of speech, not of things." Three centuries later, Richard Rorty made exactly the same point when he declared, "where there are no sentences, there is no truth … the world is out there, but descriptions of the world are not." Descriptions of the world are made by us, and we, in turn, are made by the categories of description that are the content of our perception. These are not categories we choose — were they not already installed there would be nothing that could do the choosing; it would make more sense (but not perfect sense) to say that they have chosen or colonized us. Both the "I" and the world it would know are functions of language. Or in Derrida’s famous and often vilified words: There is nothing outside the text. (More accurately, there is no outside-the-text.)

This is not the conclusion that would be reached either by French theory's detractors or by those American academics who embraced it. For both what was important about French theory in America was its political implications, and one of Cusset's main contentions — and here I completely agree with him — is that it doesn’t have any. When a deconstructive analysis interrogates an apparent unity — a poem, a manifesto, a sermon, a procedure, an agenda — and discovers, as it always will, that its surface coherence is achieved by the suppression of questions it must not ask if it is to maintain the fiction of its self-identity, the result is not the discovery of an anomaly, of a deviance from a norm that can be banished or corrected; for no structure built by man (which means no structure) could be otherwise.

If "presences" — perspicuous and freestanding entities — are made by discursive forms that are inevitably angled and partial, the announcement that any one of them rests on exclusions it (necessarily) occludes cannot be the announcement of lack or error. No normative conclusion — this is bad, this must be overthrown — can legitimately be drawn from the fact that something is discovered to be socially constructed; for by the logic of deconstructive thought everything is; which doesn’t mean that a social construction cannot be criticized, only that it cannot be criticized for being one. Deconstruction's technique of always going deeper has no natural stopping place, leads to no truth or falsehood that could then become the basis of a program of reform. Only by arresting the questioning and freeze-framing what Derrida called the endless play of signifiers can one make deconstruction into a political engine, at which point it is no longer deconstruction, but just another position awaiting deconstruction. "Deconstruction thus contains within itself…an endless metatheoretical regression that can no longer be brought to a stop by any practical decision or effective political engagement. In order to use it as a basis for subversion…the American solution was..to divert it…to split it off from itself." American academics "forced deconstruction against itself to produce a political 'supplement' and in so doing substituted for "Derrida's patient philological deconstruction" a "bellicose drama.""


While Fish's account of Derrida's 'negative theology' is quite coherent I'm less than convinced that it's an especially accurate summary of what Derrida had intended. In some senses it would be more valid to argue that Derrida intended a revaluation of all values, overturning logocentric western hierarchies, rather than simply a pragmatist redescription of the linguistic turn (particularly since an alteration of our understanding of how the world is described does change the world perhaps rather more than Fish is suggesting - his pragmatist account of the philosophy of science being a rather telling case in point). The extension of this to the feminist concept of phallogocentrism, with its influence on Cixous, Irrigaray and, indeed, Butler, introduces an explicitly political element into his work. Derrida certainly felt deconstruction to have political implications in his later stress on a form of Kantian idealism that stated justice to be the undeconstructible condition that makes deconstruction possible. In that sense, Fish is introducing a criticism of Derrida more than his American interpreters. I seem to recall Rorty wondering why should we think that the abandonment of Platonic ideas and strivings would have important ramifications for the rest of culture and questioning why Derrida insisted that science has been constrained by 'metaphysical bonds that have borne on its definition and movement from its beginning.' Instead Rorty preferred to cite the likes of Popper and Dewey to argue that the natural sciences have done a lot to loosen those bonds, and to make possible a post-metaphysical culture.

Update: a piece arguing that Derrida's ideas of differance can be empirically tested and found wanting:

"Hijacking methods from psychology, Joseph Carroll, John Johnson, Dan Kruger, and I surveyed the emotional and analytic responses of 500 literary scholars and avid readers to characters from scores of 19th-century British novels. We wanted to determine how different their reading experiences truly were. Did reactions to characters vary profoundly from reader to reader? As we write in "Graphing Jane Austen," a book undergoing peer review, there were variations in what our readers thought and felt about literary characters, but it was expertly contained by the authors within narrow ranges. Our conclusion: rumors of the author's demise have been greatly exaggerated."


I've always regarded Derrida as a Hume in need of a Kant to refute him; while Derrida's logic is robust there remains the gnawing sense that we empirically already know that language functions in far more straightforward and unambiguous terms than he suggests (as with Tarski's meta-analyses of language and their use to map the hermeneutic possibilities of even texts like Ulysses). Nonetheless, I'm not sure that the above approach is necessarily the best way to determine the 'valency quotient' of any given text; response to characterisation is a fairly narrow aspect of the response to the text as a whole. Assuming the above study relates to Jane Austen it also seems important to note that texts like The Outsider, Querelle of Brest or Correction would prove a father more difficult proposition.

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posted by Richard 7:48 pm