Key Thinkers and Canons
Now that’s funny. Made me do one of those loony blurts of laughter at the computer screen that solidify one’s feeling of creeping insanity. No but really, it is funny. The Guardian has a really exceptionally irritating smug knowing comment in a leader on our debt to Derrida. My point is not to quarrel with the late Derrida, whom I haven’t read; my point is to quarrel with this particular remark in this particular rather silly piece in the Guardian.
What was important was that deconstruction held that no text was above analysis or closed to alternative interpretation. It is no coincidence that it came into vogue in the 1960s and 1970s, when many cultural and social institutions were being challenged. As a result, Derrida became popular among those willing to question the sterile idea of a “western canon” who wanted to expand literary discourse so that writers such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon could sit alongside the Brontes. Thanks to Derrida, many new voices were heard.
Sterile? Sterile?? Sterile in what sense, you, you [takes deep breath, starts over]. For one thing, there is no ‘western canon’, that’s a straw man. Yes yes, I know, Harold Bloom called a book that, but that’s because of all the people droning about the sterility of this non-existent western canon. There is no fucking canon. Okay? There isn’t. What there is, is a lot of reading lists for university literature surveys, especially in the US where people don’t get much of the kind of thing in secondary school. But that’s not a ‘canon.’ That’s a pejorative people came up with to get people to stop reading Shakespeare and read other people instead. Reading other people is fine, if they’re good (and if they’re not, if that’s what you want to do), but actually discouraging people from reading Shakespeare, by sneering about canons, is another matter. For a second thing, if there were a ‘western canon’ (which there isn’t), why would it be sterile? What’s sterile about reading, say, Homer and Euripides and Thucydides and Montaigne and Byron and Austen and Hazlitt? Eh? And for a third thing, what does ‘could sit alongside the Brontes’ mean? Anything? No, but it implies something – that thanks to Derrida, we now get to think that Mary Elizabeth Braddon is as good as Emily Bronte (not ‘the Brontes,’ since they are two different writers, after all, not a unit). Well guess what – she isn’t. Not even close. I haven’t read Derrida but I have read some Braddon, and she is mildly entertaining, but she is not within shouting distance of the author of Wuthering Heights.
The funny bit is that I was going to do a N&C to say exactly that, and then I saw that A C Grayling had got there first. Good.
Your leader express a gratitude to Jacques Derrida for impugning the idea of a literary “canon” (October 11). What deconstruction and its postmodern allies, in theory, actually do is abandon standards of judgment, describing these as tools of snobbery and exclusion, and thereby making it a criterion of excellence that a work’s author (his or her intentions, of course, aside) has an appropriate gender, ethnicity, or geographical origin.
The good reasons why these latter considerations should count in giving a hearing to traditionally suppressed voices should not be confused with the question of what constitutes the highest critical standards: it is part of the damage done by Derrida and his kind that the latter have been replaced almost wholesale by the former.
Exactly. The bit about snobbery and exclusion is what really gets up my nose. That’s the bit of cultural work that word ‘sterile’ is doing – that’s what I mean by ‘discouraging’ people from reading Shakespeare. It’s false, it’s stupid, and it’s harmful, and I wish people would knock it off. It is not ‘elitist’ to read or to like Shakespeare, and the sooner that idea gets drummed out of the ‘canon’ of right-on ideas, the better. Go, Anthony – tell ’em!
It was also amusing to see the Guardian’s idea of key thinkers. snicker, snort. Alain de Botton and Julie Burchill? gasp, wheeze.
Anyway, when I spotted the article, the first thing I thought was, I wonder if that Baggini fella we keep running into is one of their key thinkers. So I hit the down button, and sure enough. He’s everywhere, that guy. Even here.
Update: You know the best thing about Derrida? People who read him learn not to be so dogmatic! So they tell us, anyway.
I’m not surprised by a word Grayling writes these days (except a mild kind of surprise that he’s stirred himself to write about anything other than how people who believe in God are idiots), but I am surprised at this comment:
“For a second thing, if there were a ‘western canon’ (which there isn’t), why would it be sterile?”.
The Guardian did not say that “the western canon was sterile”. It said that “the idea of a western canon was sterile”. This is not the same thing (by comparison, a prison full of men might have only virile men in it, but since it has no women, the prison itself sterile).
Derrida’s point was that, for example, if the decision as to what constituted literature was left to the sensibilities of, say, FR Leavis and his opponents, it would be entirely possible that we would have missed someone like James Kelman, because there are some people (thank God they are quite rare) who get terribly het up when they see a couple of sweary words and immediately suspend their critical faculties. Derrida is usually too polite to say it, but his central claim is that most literary critics are systematically dishonest when it comes to making an honest assessment of what literature moves them, because they don’t want to be seen to like socially unacceptable works. And, of course, he’s right. Although it is not composed of sterile works, the “Western Canon” as maintained by people like Harold Bloom, is a sterile concept because its maintenance relies on everyone accepting that we have to regard a work as valueless if it doesn’t fit into the worldview of a fat, self-important old queen at Yale.
If one takes Derrida’s words on board, and attempts to guard against one’s instinct to make snap judgements about works of literature based on one’s own social conditioning (rather like trying to remember to taste foreign food rather than shutting down and judging it as “strange”), then one can often find quite wonderful works produced by people who had previously been excluded from literature. When one makes a discovery of this sort, one might buy their books and place them on the library shelves in alphabetical order, which is presumably what the Guardian meant by saying that Ms Braddon was able to “sit alongside the Brontes”.
So in other words, the central message of Derrida is that you and AC Grayling may have convinced yourself that your judgements of quality in art are purely aesthetic responses completely unrelated to any base social or political preferences, but, in the words of Mandy Rice-Davies, “he would say that, wouldn’t he?”
True, about what the Guardian said.
“his central claim is that most literary critics are systematically dishonest when it comes to making an honest assessment of what literature moves them, because they don’t want to be seen to like socially unacceptable works. And, of course, he’s right.”
Of course. Depending on how one defines ‘most’…
I agree about the concept, as maintained by Bloom or anyone else – I think he should have refused to rise to the bait. But as for the worldview of fat, old people, at Yale or at Arkansas State – I don’t see why they should be dismissed more than the worldview of thin, young people. Possibly less. Some old people know more than a good many young people. The time thing helps.
“then one can often find quite wonderful works produced by people who had previously been excluded from literature.”
Well no kidding. And Braddon isn’t it.
“When one makes a discovery of this sort, one might buy their books and place them on the library shelves in alphabetical order”
Right. But Braddon wouldn’t be there – one wouldn’t bother buying her. Borrow from the library, yes; buy, no.
“the central message of Derrida is that you and AC Grayling may have convinced yourself that your judgements of quality in art are purely aesthetic responses completely unrelated to any base social or political preferences,”
Really! Derrida’s central message is about me and AC Grayling! I had no idea.
Mind you, I haven’t convinced myself of any such thing. I may be stupid but I’m not that stupid. But that doesn’t mean I have to give up making aesthetic judgments altogether. And I’m not going to, either.
Wow, so someone finally figured out the “central message of Derrida.” A shame he refused to come out and say it himself.
Anyway, all this seems off the point, because I have read some Derrida, and I’ve never seen any real proof that his project was meant to deal with quality or aesthetic value. It dealt with meaning and signs, and as such, could be applied to everything equally (in theory). I think it is his followers that may have started in with the value judgments.
The weird thing about the Guardian blurb is that they say his ideas made it possible to ignore an author’s intentions to find hidden meanings. If that is so, why do they then say he cannot be held accountable for the postmodernism and relativism of his followers? If his followers found those things in their deconstruction of his own writings, is he not in some way “responsible.” Or if you can ignore the author, maybe not.
Headache ensues.
“If one takes Derrida’s words on board, and attempts to guard against one’s instinct to make snap judgements about works of literature based on one’s own social conditioning (rather like trying to remember to taste foreign food rather than shutting down and judging it as “strange”), then one can often find quite wonderful works produced by people who had previously been excluded from literature. “.
So Derrida was saying that if you are braodminded and don’t make snap judgments sometimes you may find treasure in places you didn’t exepect to? Wow the guy truly is a genius. To think that that thought only arose sometime in the 20th century in the mind of some French thinker. Until then no-one had a clue that sometimes people are apt to make quick and incorrect judgments. How did we cope? So typical of much pomo luncay. To take some everyday concept which everyone understands, rephrase it until it is just about incomprehensible and then present it as some amazing new insight. The sugggestion that one needs to take Derrida’s words on board in order to guard against snap judgments is too ludicrous to beleive.
ChrisM’s comment reminds me of Paul Dirac on science and poetry:
“In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it’s the exact opposite.”
Not that I am suggesting that Derrida should be accused of poetry.
“ChrisM’s comment reminds me of Paul Dirac on science and poetry:”.
Pants! I obviously phrased the thought too clearly. If I had expanded the concept into a volume and abused some scientific tid-bits I had half picked up, maybe I could be hailed as a great thinker of original thoughts ;-).
“So Derrida was saying that if you are braodminded and don’t make snap judgments sometimes you may find treasure in places you didn’t exepect to? Wow the guy truly is a genius.”
snicker. I know – ain’t that great? We’re always being told things like that. That nobody ever had a clue that a ‘text’ could be interpreted more than one way until 1967. Goes with this hilarious line in Guardian piece –
“What was important was that deconstruction held that no text was above analysis or closed to alternative interpretation.”
Ah – as opposed to what? All those other schools of thought which held that some texts are above analysis and closed to alternative interpretations? What schools of thought would those be, exactly? Other than religious fundamentalisms of various kinds. I don’t know if it’s more hilarious or pathetic that anyone thinks deconstruction invented that idea.
Yes, and Shakespeare only wrote that, like, sometimes you want to stand up for yourself, and sometimes you can’t be bothered, and it’s often hard to decide which one you want to do. Obvious or what?
Darwin just wrote that kids look like their parents. Jesus, pig-farmers and dog-breeders had known about that for centuries!
John Maynard Keynes, what a pleb. Like nobody else had realised that if people are out of a job, it’s a good idea to find somethig useful for them to do? The rubbish they gave fellowships for in the 1930s.
Don’t even get me started on Descartes. You could be wrong about things? Oh puhleaze!? Einstein is a bit laboured too, of _course_ all motion is motion relative to a frame of reference.
and so on … did it ever occur to you, that there might be more to it than that?
If you’re interested (and of course you’re not), then no, that is not “all there is” to Derrida. It’s my explanation of one of his points, specifically the one that the Guardian wrote about, and which you didn’t understand. Most of the rest of his work is on a general theory of (the incoherence of the concept of) meaning. The insincerity of literary critics is just a particular case of the failure of attempts to assign objective standards of meaning for Derrida; in some of his moods he claims to have shown that all such attempts are doomed to failure. That’s why his work was so influential; he actually bothered to argue for his claims and to encourage people to think hard about processes of criticism and valuation that they tended to take for granted. Once you’ve read and understood Derrida it’s very hard to be so dogmatic about the status of your own views on literature, just as once you’ve read Hume it’s very hard to be dogmatic about the status of your own claims about value. People had disagreed about questions of morality before Hume, but Hume invented the fact/value distinction. (There are a number of interesting analogies between Derrida’s scepticism, a scepticism which he denies holding, and Hume’s)
I don’t agree with him on all his claims, and he can be a bit dull to read at times, but guess what? Immanuel Kant is also hard going, and I don’t agree with him either. Most good things are difficult and most books worth reading are worth disagreeing with. (You might also consider the maxim that every book worth writing about is worth reading, a principle which might have saved Grayling from embarrassing himself).
I mean come on. If you can’t be bothered putting in the work understanding Derrida, how the heck do you hope to ever understand anything in the natural sciences?
Point-missing again. The mockery was directed at what you said, not at what Derrida said. I’m not mocking Derrida; I haven’t read him, as I’ve already said; I’m mocking his epigones.
Roger,
Hmm. I seem to have read different memoirs and accounts of universities in the ’50s. Kingsley Amis was long out of university by then. Both A S Byatt and Margaret Drabble, for example, found Leavis pretty stimulating – much the way people now find Derrida stimulating. So, I believe, did Ian McKellen and Trevor Nunn. The RSC would probably have been a different thing if Leavis had not existed. Mind you, I for one find Leavis highly irritating in a lot of ways, but not in all ways. He was very far from being just some dreary old conservative bore, which is how he’s often portrayed.
P.S.
“If you can’t be bothered putting in the work understanding Derrida, how the heck do you hope to ever understand anything in the natural sciences?”
Who said I have any hope to understand anything in the natural sciences?! I have no such hope! As I’ve mentioned a few times in the past few days.
Hmmm, so to recap, you’re happy to write about science without understanding it, to write about postmodernism without understanding it, and then to mock anyone who tries to explain it to you, without understanding them? And your justification for this is that you’re just giving your opinion, which is as valid as anyone else’s?
Just out of interest, how is the war against “epistemic relativism” going? I’d say pretty badly from the evidence here.
Oh yeh, and there were three Brontes (four if you count Bramwell), not two.
“Darwin just wrote that kids look like their parents. Jesus, pig-farmers and dog-breeders had known about that for centuries!…”
E=mc^2. Genuine new idea.
More fit individuals will have more offspring than less fit individuals prefentially passing on advantageous heritable traits driving a process of evolution which explains the existance of the myriad forms of life we see around us. (It in no way concerns itself with arbiogenisis, for any creationists who may be reading this). Genuine new idea.
The speed of light is fixed. Genuine new idea.
These when proposed were NOT restatements of existing ideas, they were genuine new ideas and contributions to human knowledge. It may be that Derrida has also made genuine contributions to the sum total of human knowledge. A sympathetic advocate should be able to give a better summation of the highlights of what the person had to offer. If the best includes that texts can be read in multiple ways that does not bode well. Maybe he just needs better obiturary writers though.
There were two Brontes, because I don’t count Anne either, never mind Bramwell.
Okay, dsquared, enlighten us: Describe IN DETAIL just one of Derrida’s brilliant insights and how it has improved our understanding of the world and ourselves. Show us how it goes beyond, for instance, the boring old platitude that our our esthetic judgments are influenced by our socio-political beliefs.
(BTW, how would Derrida explain the fact that I love some works of art whose political underpinnings I find repulsive and am bored by some works of art whose political underpinnings I applaud?)
Although Leavis might have been (a) inspiring to some in the 1950s and (b) dead by then, I can assure you that in the 1980s, at least one major university in the southern English midlands, some literature dons were very happy to (a) talk about ‘the canon’, (b) define it as a limited set, and (c) be deeply uninspiring.
Some kind of reaction to this attitude seems to be inevitable, whatever form (good, bad, or ugly) it took in practice. ‘The canon’ was never just a straw man. Look at Penguin colour-schemes, for example.
I realise that just taking one quote from anyone, living or dead, postmodernist or otherwise, may be misleading, but I read the following Derrida quote at Harry’s Place:
“Senator, it is simply false to say that funding the SSC [the superconducting supercollider] will interfere with support for research on high temperature superconductivity. But it is above all not true. And vice versa.”
I think that anyone who uses such twisted and unintelligible sentences deserves all the ridicule he gets.
Okay, dsquared, enlighten us: Describe IN DETAIL
Of course, I will do this as soon as I receive confirmation (by email, address above) that you will pay $500 to a charity of my choice if, after an exchange of five posts each between us, an independent judge, to be agreed between the two of us, decides that you are not making a good faith attempt to understand.
dsquared: Maybe I came off sounding snarky, but I am open to persuasion on this matter. Why won’t you at least try?
Barney. Simply magnificent.
Because you didn’t ask politely, and because everyone else on this thread has run away from any serious defence of their position to retreat behind a suspiciously Derridean defence of their statements as not being serious arguments.
How odd that intellectuals nowadays don’t want to argue for their views. Apparently, the audience must prove itself worthy of receiving their pearls of wisdom. Is this philosophy or a cult initiation?
Actually, ChrisM in his last post made some pertinent objections to your remarks, D-squared, without being rude and without retreating to a “suspiciously Derridean defense” of his statements. And I for one would definitely be interested in hearing a solid defense/explication of the late Pomo maestro. Somehow my college professors, who could explain Wittgenstein and Kant ably enough, couldn’t make Derrida intelligible or interesting to me. Perhaps you can.
Connie, Do you really think intellectuals don’t like to argue anymore?
‘because everyone else on this thread has run away from any serious defence of their position to retreat behind a suspiciously Derridean defence of their statements as not being serious arguments.’
Not true. I simply repeated what I said in the comment itself: I’m not criticising Derrida, whom I haven’t read, I’m criticising (as well as mocking) some of his followers and/or fans, such as the writer of the Guardian piece.
‘Because you didn’t ask politely’
We don’t need your help in teaching our readers to be polite, thanks. If we did need help in teaching our readers to be polite, you’re not the first person we would think of to give it. You’re not even high on the list. In fact – well, you get the idea.
dsquared – many’s the time that I have responded to the online invitation “Write me an article” with the classic “No, you read a book” answer. So I have some sympathy with you in this one. But please can you point to where I came over all Derridian above? I can’t see it myself. I could be wrong, being a mere empiricist ‘n all.
My offer remains open; if you’re as serious as all that, then you won’t end up paying the $500.
D-squared, Even if Connie were trolling (and I don’t think she is), there are many others who read this website who might be persuaded that there is more to Derrida than meets the eye. This website would be the perfect place to win over the sceptical. If you don’t want to write a defense of Mr. D, can you at least direct us to some essays (preferably online) that do a good job explaining and defending Derrida in clear, straightforward prose?
Instead of looking for some kind of clear summary of Derrida, you should just jump in and read some of his stuff. There is a Derrida Reader. You won’t understand a lot of it, but you will find that there are small bit, sentences and paragraphs, that are transcendant. It wasn’t for no reason that he was popular with students; he had a way with language. I still couldn’t honestly evaluate the quality of his project though.
Eric: Some thinkers really do require explication. Kant doesn’t make much sense without a background in philosophy (especially in Hume and Leibniz) and a thorough understanding of his clumsy sesquipedalian terms (Original Synthetic Unity of Apperception, my friggin’ ass!). If you want people to get into Kant, you are going to have to do a hell of a lot of explication. But once that’s done, most people can begin to appreciate why Kant is so important.
Some thinkers are brilliant writers but not very systematic. It can be very easy to take their isolated remarks out of context and completely misunderstand what they are saying. Nietzsche is a perfect example of this. But with the help of decent introductory works (e.g., Kaufmann’s and Leiter’s) you can avoid some of the more vulgar errors in interpreting his thought.
Maybe Derrida falls into one or both of these categories. But I have yet to read a paraphrase or defense of him that revealed anything in his thought that wasn’t a truism or pompous absurdity. I am willing to grant that maybe I have misunderstood Derrida and have had the bad luck to encounter only poor interpreters of his work. But I’m beginning to doubt it.
dsquared: Ridiculous. Why should I have to prove myself worthy to receive your commentary on Derrida? Just write your little five-paragraph essay. If I respond with what you consider trollish questions or comments, you are free to ignore me thereafter. Honestly, every time I ask a devotee of Derrida to explain what’s so great about him, I’m told that if I don’t already know, then I don’t deserve to know. Doesn’t sound like a very philosophical approach to me.
As for me, I’m perfectly willing to believe there is merit to Derrida. I’m much less willing to be impressed by his influence, because what people who talk about him take away seems to be so obvious-belaboring. They’ve learned from reading him that language is not transparent. Er – Derrida isn’t really the first person ever to notice that. But Derrida can’t be blamed for the fact that his followers are what used to be lit crits rather than philosophers. That’s why I haven’t been blaming him for that fact.
I don’t know that I’d “blame” Derrida for having a following mostly among literary people, but I find it interesting that he doesn’t have much of a following among philosophy professors in North America or the UK. Are philosophy professors a bunch of narrow-minded conformists unfairly excluding a great thinker because he’s unconventional? They don’t seem to have a problem with Nietzsche’s wild rhetoric or with Wittgenstein’s gnomic utterances. Are they a bunch of chauvinists snubbing him because he’s French? Or are they ignoring him because they haven’t found anything philosophically useful in his writings? I don’t know. I do know that several talented professors (in comparative literature and intellectual history, not in philosophy) tried to explain his importance to me but failed. They kept giving me these “obvious-belaboring” interpretations. Maybe I have a blind spot, or maybe those admiring professors do.
Connie:
The reason I say just read Derrida instead of finding an explication is because you are just not going to find one. Even if you did, it seems no two people can agree on what it should mean, and it would be far from definitive. Maybe this means we should just pass over the whole thing in silence.
Connie: There are, in fact, two very good essays about Derrida linked from the front page of Butterflies & Wheels. Why don’t *you* tell *me* what’s wrong with them, and then maybe I’ll consider helping. That way, it would be *you* rather than *me* putting in the initial effort, for a project which would on the face of it be designed to benefit you more than me.
Karl: Derrida not popular in North America???? Are you sure?
The two essays (obituaries, really) are too vague and don’t say much more than that Derrida taught people that things aren’t just black or white, or that we must beware of unconscious biases. But these are just bromides we’ve all heard long before Derrida came on the scene. I want to know how he brought something NEW to these seemingly banal observations. I’m not looking for some grand summary of Derrida’s thought in all its manifold complexity. I’d just like one small example demonstrating how he made us see something we hadn’t noticed before. Just one small example.
I said he wasn’t popular among philosophy professors in North America. He’s plenty popular among literature, anthropology, and ethnic studies professors. I base this conclusion on my experience at two major universities, plus frequent perusal of various academic journals. I knew only one philosophy professor who had anything good to say about Derrida, but even he never found a place for him in the syllabus. I haven’t seen many articles on Derrida in the philosophy journals I’ve glanced at. Culture studies journals, however, print lots of articles about Derrida. Perhaps he does have a large following in the philosophy departments of American universities and I’ve somehow missed it. Do you think he does, D-squared?
For what it’s worth – I have read one explicit dismissal of the value of Derrida by a North American philosopher – Martha Nussbaum, who said (I think in Cultivating Humanity) that when you’ve read some genuinely difficult philosophy, Derrida seems comparatively trivial (or words to that effect). On the other hand, Jerry S tells me he knows some hardheaded philosophers who do find Derrida worthwhile. On the third hand, it’s certainly been my experience that the people who cite Derrida are not philosophers but lit crits, cult studs, people like that. And that they do tend to cite Derrida as the source for ideas that have been around longer than 74 years. It is hard not to conclude that they’re a little too easily impressed…
I wonder if Them Litcritters read Derrida in the same way that Us Historians read Foucault (or even, whisper it not, Latour*): pouncing on the gems of insight that are there so as to quote them (out of context if necessary), and feeling warm and fuzzy because there’s this cool clever bloke who is writing about our stuf. But not trying too hard to tease it all out to make a coherent intellectual system.
And maybe the way that Them Philosophers look at us both is to point out that, it’s actually very difficult to make a coherent intellectual system out of the work of either of these people, clever though they might have been. So are we therefore idiots? Quite possibly. Are we worse litcritters or historians? It depends.
*I’ve done this, in published work. Ready your rotten fruit.
Chris Williams: I suspect you’re exactly right. I had to read a fair amount of Foucault as a grad and undergrad, and came to the same conclusion as you did: scattered bits here and there mixed in with a lot of very dubious stuff, a grain of truth pushed to ridiculous extremes. I always found it amusing that philosophers considered Foucault a historian and historians considered him a philosopher.
Like Rossetti: poets thought he was a crap poet, so must be a brilliant artist: artists, vice versa.
I fully intend to keep quoting bits of Foucault when I think that he’s summed up something that I see going on. Nobody should mistake that for me agreeing with everything (or even most things) that he wrote.
The question is, do litcritters feel the same way about Derrida, and if they do, should we still give them as hard a time as if they were putting a tick mark beside everything he said an wrote.
Perhaps of interest: David Stove’s Karl Popper takedown, “Anything Goes”, seems echoed by “Everything Goes”:
http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/tburke1/perma101204a.html
(in which horribilis modernus might take the place of horribilis victoriana, IIRC).
OB – Well, I don’t know if it’s one of the intentions of your enduringly readable site, but all this, forthright debate (and admittedly, there’s an amount of rather exiting strafing going on too) has led me to actually pick up a book and even post the following. It may be a bit basic for some of you chaps, but it’s helped me a bit, so here goes: (Those of you with any priming in C20th philosophy should probably look away or go put the kettle on)
“(Deconstruction …is) a technique associated with Jacques Derrida, who in 1967 inaugurated the post structural movement with his book Of Grammatology. In a series of astute readings of major philosophical and literary texts, Derrida showed that, by taking the unspoken or unformulated propositions of a text literally, by showing the gaps and supplements, the subtle internal self-contradictions, the text can be shown to be saying something quite other than what it appears to be saying. In fact, in a certain sense, the text can be shown not to be ‘saying something’ at all, but many different things, some of which subtly subvert the conscious intentions of the writer. By throwing into relief the self-betrayal of the text, the effects of the supplement and of difference, of trace and of dissemination, Derrida shows that the text is telling its own story, quite a different story from what the writer imagines he is creating. A new text thus gradually begins to emerge, but this text too is subtly at variance with itself, and the deconstruction continues in what could be an infinite regress of dialectical readings.
The main effect of Derrida’s deconstructive teaching has been to destroy the naïve assumption the text has ‘a’ meaning, which industry, application and attentive good faith will eventually winnow out – the basic assumption of the old New Criticism of the 1940s and 1950s. Meaning is not encased or contained in language, but is co-extensive with the play of language itself. Derrida shows that the meanings of a text are ‘disseminated’ across its entire surface, but are and remain purely linguistic surface features: there is no one guaranteeing ‘meaning’ which inhabits a text which constitutes its presence. The link between text and meaning is cut. Authorial intention dissolves in the play of signifiers; the text is seen to subvert its own apparent meaning; and there is no reference from the language of the text to some mystical interior of the text, in which some non-linguistic essence (‘meaning’) would or could ultimately be found.”
Roger Poole, Professor of English, university of Nottingham, in the, to me, very meaningful New Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought, 3e. 1999, Fontana.
Now there is a lot of intellectual brilliance evident in all that, no doubt, which, even to this relative ignoramus, is to be applauded (Just because any arching wide-open intellectual endeavour that doesn’t end in mass graves should generally be encouraged by us as a species). But there is also some copping out apparent to this beginner – see the wonderfully open ended “A new text thus gradually begins to emerge, but this text too is subtly at variance with itself, and the deconstruction continues in what could be an infinite regress of dialectical readings.”
Phew, that’s handy.
But bottom line: excuse me if I make the assumption that what is at least a part of what is riling some folk is that just because a person has read some of this provocative, brilliant, challenging work, while working say in a university Humanities Dept, that they can then ‘prove’ (i.e dictate) to a feeble undergrad why Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings is racist, and therefore to be avoided. Or why some BA Fine Art students are obliged to spend valuable study time looking at third-rate, poorly executed, shallow, art – because the ‘module’ is about ‘ethnicity’ or ‘eco-feminism’, etc, rather than Fine Art… right, I’m getting back in my bunker – fire away…
“The link between text and meaning is cut. Authorial intention dissolves in the play of signifiers; the text is seen to subvert its own apparent meaning….”
Doesn’t this go way too far? Isn’t this a fancy way of saying Anything Goes? It is obvious that many texts are open to numerous interpretations, that we can never be completely certain of an author’s intention, and that sometimes an author might say more than he or she intended. But it doesn’t follow that all interpretations are of equal worth or that (except in the case of irony) the text SUBVERTS its own meaning.
Again, as Ophelia has said, intelligent critics didn’t need Derrida to make them aware that a text might have more than one meaning. Has Derrida added anything to our understanding of these things? I still don’t see it. Personally, I think that cognitive psychology is more likely eventually to yield useful results about the perception and interpretation of artworks.
It looks like Derrida suggested something that lots of others thought looked like good fun. Which is slightly different from a deep philosophical insight.
Nick S: Thanks for the post. I’m afraid, though, that I didn’t find it very helpful. What exactly does it mean to say that “meaning is not encased or contained in language but co-extensive with the play of language…that the meanings of a text are ‘disseminated’ across its entire surface…”? Can anyone give me a practical demonstration of how you actually deconstruct a text? Does this method allow for judging the worth or truth-value of any meaning you come up with? Does this method even recognize the truth-values or probabilities of various meanings? Does it consider truth-value or probability unimportant or meaningless? If so, then isn’t deconstruction, at best, useful only for generating lots of off-the-wall ideas, some of which might otherwise have been overlooked and a very small number of which might turn out to be fruitful–a sort of high-falutin’ version Ed de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats?
Karl “Doesn’t this go way too far? Isn’t this a fancy way of saying Anything Goes?” Yes, I agree, although I might add Prof Poole goes on in his closing comments to say that these theories, while very popular in 1980s-90s US EngLit studies, have generally reached a ‘fallow patch’.
That could be interpreted as a polite way of saying ‘I really like this guy, but he’s had his day’… or am I ‘demystifying’ a myth behind a reality ?
Connie, thanks, unfortunately you’re way beyond me there (politics is my bag generally) – sounds like a job for dsquared ??
“…a sort of high-falutin’ version of Ed de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats”
Ouch! That’s cruel. Poor Derrida.
Nick S: I’m afraid if I have to wait for dsquared to explain it, I’ll be waiting a long, long, long time. Thanks for your attempt, though.
Karl: Well, I tried to find some merit in what I take to be Derrida’s method, and that’s the kindest thing I could think of. If I’ve misrepresented deconstruction, why doesn’t someone please show me where I’m wrong?
Why, D-squared will show you how wrong you are, Connie. Any day now, I’m sure.
How can Connie be wrong? Any view on anything is just a “discourse” afterall.
Quite so, ChrisM. But even if there are objective criteria, I’m never wrong.
If a man says something in a forest, and ther is no woman to hear him, is he still wrong ?
I note that, two weeks later, nobody has taken me up on my offer.
Yes, and for the reasons already stated by Connie and others. If you’ve got some neat insight on Derrida, just share it with us already. Jesus, you sound like a troll.