[percy-l] Does Deconstruction Have a Future?

Robert_Pauley at oxy.com Robert_Pauley at oxy.com
Tue Oct 7 18:13:09 EDT 2003


Thanks sending for this along. I it enjoyed. 

	-----Original Message-----
	From: percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:percy-l-bounces at lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of JHForest at cs.com
	Sent: Tuesday, October 07, 2003 4:51 AM
	To: percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org
	Subject: [percy-l] Does Deconstruction Have a Future?
	
	
	A friend passed in California this along to me.
	
	Jim
	
	* * *
	
	Does Deconstruction Have a Future?
	
	Dr. Donald DeMarco
	St. Jerome's University
	
	Universities, despite their professed dedication to the classics, are as
	likely to be influenced by passing fads as the barometer is by changes in
	the atmospheric pressure. One of the more pernicious fads that has
	influenced higher education over the past few decades is deconstruction.
	The underlying assumption of deconstruction is that linguistic expressions
	are so inherently ambiguous that they can be analyzed and discussed
	endlessly without anyone ever being able to decide what it is that they
	mean. Undecidability, then, becomes the essential character of any literary
	text, not meaning.
	
	The current deconstruction fad owes much to the thought of Jacques Derrida
	(1939- ), whose essay "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the
	Human Sciences" (1966) and his book Of Grammatology (1967) provide 
	its theoretical framework. In these works, Derrida attempts to show that 
	any text (a philosophical treatise, a poem, a polemic, or even an exercise 
	in deconstructive criticism) can be interpreted in ways that are 
	fundamentally at variance with, contradictory to, and subversive of what 
	may be viewed as a stable and coherent meaning.
	
	His famous maxim, "Il n'y a rien hors du texte" ("There is nothing but the
	text") indicates that a text has no point of reference beyond itself. There
	is only, so to speak, "wall-to-wall textuality".
	
	To deconstruct is to debunk, unmask, demystify, strip the text of any
	reference to the transcendent. It does not elucidate. There does not exist
	any "real world" to be elucidated. It, too, is merely a text. The great
	enemy of deconstruction is something they call "logocentrism," particularly
	the "logos" or "reason" celebrated in the Gospel according to St. John.
	Deconstructionists are not children of the "light".
	
	To anyone who sees language as an opening to a world of real values,
	deconstruction is simply a path to nihilism. In this regard, the late
	novelist Walker Percy has said that the whole deconstructive enterprise is
	nothing more than an attempt to get rid of God by first disposing of
	grammar. Nonetheless, part of the allure for the deconstructionist is that
	it presents escape from the "closure of knowledge". The open-ended
	indefiniteness of textuality--"placing [everything] in the abyss" (mettre
	en abîme) -- offers the intoxicating image of the abyss as freedom, of 
	never hitting bottom. As a consequence of their eager acceptance of 
	undecidability and their fondness for putting words under erasure (sous 
	rature), deconstructionists do not experience despair, but allegedly 
	emancipate themselves from the tyranny of all authority while crediting 
	themselves with unbound creativity. It is nihilism, so to speak, with a 
	happy ending.
	
	"Reduced to its simplest terms and taken to its logical conclusion," writes
	David Thibodaux in The Cloning of the American Mind," deconstruction is
	basically the notion that language is a hopelessly imperfect vehicle for
	the expression of ideas, and because words have no inherent meaning,
	"meaning" - all meaning is relative."
	
	Deconstruction is virtually synonymous with the post-structuralism of the
	postmodern world. It claims that the major structures by which we organize
	our thought are neither natural nor inevitable, but artificial
	constructions. It promises, therefore, to rouse us out of complacency and
	naïveté so that we see nothing more than what the text can justify.
	
	Perhaps the earliest known deconstructionist is the ancient sophist,
	Gorgias of Leontini (died 375 BC), a contemporary of Socrates. Being 
	more concerned with rhetoric than reality, more enamored by words
	than wisdom, he wrote a treatise entitled Of Nature or the Non-Existent in
	which he used the power of the word to deconstruct the world. He reasoned
	as follows: since non-existence is non-existence, non-existence is.
	Therefore, non-existence is and its opposite, existence is not.
	
	Gorgias went on to assert that even if anything did exist, we could
	not know it, and in the unlikely event that we could know something, we
	could not communicate it.
	
	Many critics of deconstruction have labeled it as an intellectual fad, an
	academic cult, a philosophy of the absurd, or more imaginatively, as in the
	words of critic David Leyman, "the sguiggle of fancy French mustard on the
	hot dog of banal observation". Screenwriter Mark Horowitz expresses his
	disdain for deconstruction by saying of his French contemporaries, "We sent
	them Jerry Lewis, so they retaliated by sending us deconstruction and
	Jacques Derrida."
	
	Walter Jackson Bate, Harvard's most prestigious literary critic, sees
	deconstruction as representing "a nihilistic view of literature, of human
	communication, and of life itself." Rene Wellek, author of a six-volume
	work on the History of Modern Criticism, makes the comment that "Recent
	varieties of skepticism lead literally not only to the 'deconstruction' but to 
	the destruction of all literary criticism and scholarship."
	
	Walker Percy may have produced the most trenchant criticism of
	deconstruction. He views the typical deconstructionist as a academic 
	who claims that texts have no referents, yet leaves a message on his
	wife's telephone answering machine requesting pepperoni pizza. The message
	is a text and the pizza is a referent. The true deconstructionist (if there
	could be one), however, since he loves to erase words, would have his pizza
	message deconstructed by the telephone answering machine's self-erasing
	tape. He would have successfully deconstructed his text. But he should not
	be surprised when his pepperoni pizza fails to materialize.
	
	Allan Bloom states in The Closing of the American Mind, a book that
	remained on the New York Times best-seller list for over 30 weeks, sold
	900,000 hardcover copies in its first year in print, and was named the New
	York Times Book Review's "Notable Book of the Year," that deconstruction
	"is the last predictable stage in the suppression of reason and the denial
	of the possibility of truth in the name of philosophy." "This fad will
	pass," he goes on to predict, "as it has already in Paris."
	
	The continuing success of Bloom's book and the reforms that it continues to
	inspire offer hope. The response to The Closing of the American Mind by
	deconstructionists themselves exposes their own duplicity. Bloom himself 
	found it somewhat amusing, though most revealing, that deconstructionists, 
	apostles of undecidability that they proclaim to be, needed little time in 
	deciding that The Closing of the American Mind is "sexist," "racist," 
	"elitist," and so on. "The violence and passion of the reaction" to his 
	book, in Bloom's words, made it even more evident that deconstruction 
	is more of a cult than it is a legitimate form of criticism.
	
	In his review of Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the
	Humanities, Andrew J. Angyal, who is a professor of English at Eton 
	College in North Carolina, also sees hope. He finds that the excesses of 
	deconstruction have caused it to lose its credibility and believes that "a 
	strengthening of public education and a healthy skepticism about 
	intellectual fads and trends within the profession will help to restore sanity 
	and balance to the humanities and help them to regain a sense of their 
	traditional mission and purpose within the liberal arts education." 
	Deconstruction will achieve its final objective in deconstructing its own future.
	
	* * * 

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