Fish Spins Derrida (in his grave)
Stanley Fish uses the occasion of an upcoming book by Francois Cusset to restate his old line that deconstruction, properly understood, has no political implications. He writes that, after deconstruction has done its work on some scientific or literary text,”[t]he world, and you, will go on pretty much in the same old way.” He continues:
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.
I appreciate the skepticism Fish wants to direct toward some of Derrida’s American acolytes, and I have no doubt that Derrida has been grossly misused in American humanities departments (I have seen in done many times), but, at the same time, I ain’t buying what Fish is selling.
At the end of this passage, he slyly makes a normative assertion look like a description, using “is” when he really means “should be.” There’s some irony in Fish trying to decide this argument by suggesting that deconstruction, contrary to deconstruction, should be (much less is) in control of its implications. Fish, who often spritzes a pragmatist gloss onto his writings, ought to appreciate the need to assess deconstruction at least in part by what its implications turn out to be.
But even apart from the impossibility of the argument as Fish wants to make it, there’s a simpler sort of genealogical argument that works against him, which is that deconstruction belongs to a philosophical tradition that, at its roots, is about, broadly speaking, delegitimizing received understandings and, more narrowly speaking, driven by a certain disgust with Europe’s ascendant bourgeoisie and a desire to épater it. (That Fish is a conspicuously bourgeois postmodernist has its charm, and is consistent in its own way. I will admit this.) This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s weirdly, narrowly dogmatic to insist that it isn’t political. Just because Being and Time ends in a trance of rapt passivity, that doesn’t mean it has no political implications.
I should wait until Cusset’s book comes out before I say much more, but I will note that Derrida himself had to face up to the criticism, from Marxist and feminist academics, that deconstruction was so skeptical and relativistic as to be apolitical. From a Marxist standpoint, deconstruction is certainly problematic, with its regress of deferrals of meaning that continues, well after the the socialist discussion group has broken up, onto infinity. And Derrida himself had an answer to this criticism. He said, fairly late in the game, that deconstruction “is justice.” By this he meant that deconstruction represents a spirit of tireless critical vigilance against all claims to final possession of the truth of absolute justice, which is to say that it is committed to the task of delegitimizing received understandings. Whether you want to join Derrida in aggrandizing Derrida by saying that this practice “is justice” (I would like everyone to agree that my writings “are awesomeness”) it’s hard to deny that, understood in this way, it has political implications.
It’s interesting that Fish and the Marxists (good name for a band?) have precisely the same take on deconstruction, except that the Marxists say “Isn’t that awful?” and Fish says “So don’t worry, be happy.”
(P.S. Your post is awesomeness.)
— Alan Jacobs · Apr 8, 12:05 PM · #
I don’t know how politically significant the Humanities departments of the academy are in aggregate, whether staffed by deconstructionists or New Critics. The real question to my mind is the impact of a changed (elite) culture of reading on the nature of writing. Deconstruction teaches readers to interrogate the text; the text, presumably, learns to resist interrogation, and stick to name, rank and serial number. Not a lot of pleasure in that kind of text – but, then again, most of us don’t get much of a thrill from sadism, critical or otherwise.
— Noah Millman · Apr 8, 12:41 PM · #
Deconstruction teaches readers to interrogate the text; the text, presumably, learns to resist interrogation, and stick to name, rank and serial number. Not a lot of pleasure in that kind of text – but, then again, most of us don’t get much of a thrill from sadism, critical or otherwise.
I’ve heard this argument before, mostly from classmates, and I’m not unsympathetic. But it always reminds me about the story where a student of XJ Kennedy’s complains that doing a technical breakdown of a poem was like pinning a butterfly to a board in order to study it. Kennedy replied that, like butterflies, we can also study poetry in flight. I understand that deconstruction “does violence to texts” (as they say), and in fact that if it fails to do so it isn’t achieving deconstruction at all. But texts are sturdy things, and I’ve yet to read one that wasn’t able to survive the experience.
On a basic level I think it’s important to remember that any sort of oppositional reading has to emerge, to one degree or another, from the notion that the text is worth reading at all. And while I’m open to the possibility that authors out there are bending their writing to resist deconstructive interpretation, well… I wish they wouldn’t. Because any conclusions reached about what’s found within a text are themselves conditional and situated— because they themselves are open to deconstruction— what’s to fear? (And wouldn’t you be providing ample ammunition to the decon kids for a particularly aggressive reading, in your attempts to resist deconstruction? That’s just the sort of thing they love to interpret!)
As far as politics go, I think Fish is being pretty coy (and it’s not the first time.) The idea that there is nothing outside of the interplay of language, and that all truths are founded on other ideas, each of which is itself dependent on others— I have a hard time seeing how that is going to be politically neutral to most people. What could be apolitical about fundamental questions of human cognition?
— Freddie · Apr 8, 01:38 PM · #
I agree that at a broad level decontruction is animated by a hermeneutic of suspicion, and as such is critical of established power, narrowly political or otherwise.
Beyond that broad level, however, deconstruction, in its studied refusal of the utopian (except, perhaps, the utopian ideal of reading pleasingly difficult texts in Berkeley or Paris), does not propose or even support any specific alternative political arrangement—and as such, is rightly denigrated as apolitical. Deconstruction criticizes what is received without plumping for any alternative, and indeed in its cynical way makes it impossible for any serious alternative to flourish. It is politically passive.
— Nils · Apr 8, 04:47 PM · #
Freddie:
To take your last statement first: questions of human cognition should be scientific questions, and hence, while they may or may not have political implications, should be among the most apolitical of questions in and of themselves.
On your larger response to my comment: I don’t have any problem with audacious and creative misreading – that’s what strong readers and, even more so, strong writers do (if you’ll forgive me being too Bloomian for a moment). But a critic should start from a stance of loving the text, and while each man may kill the thing he loves, the decon folks don’t kill loving not wisely but too well, but rather out of a desire for control. That’s why I called them sadists, and a sadistic critical culture is something to be resisted.
I don’t disagree that Shakespeare and Tolstoy and the rest can and will outlast them all. But there is bound to be an impact on new writing. And I suspect that this critical environment is one factor to be blamed for the “tyranny of nice” that afflicts too much promising American literature. (The French, interestingly, seem to be relatively immune, probably because they don’t take ideas seriously in and of themselves the way we do.)
— Noah Millman · Apr 8, 05:20 PM · #
Nils: Isn’t it fair to ask, though, whether or not there exist workable solutions? I do tend to agree— deconstruction is critical without offering alternatives, and I find that frustrating. But that doesn’t mean that the criticisms aren’t valid, or that the questions aren’t worth asking. As human belief runs up against the limits of knowledge, as has happened in the last century, what if the answer “there is no answer” becomes inevitable? I’m not satisfied with that, but I have to remain open to the possibility that it’s the case.
Noah: I think you may be a little too hard on the deconstructionists here. (I don’t count myself among their number, by the way.) Do they sometimes “attack” texts with too much glee, or with inadequate respect for what they’re doing? Sure. But I don’t know any of them, really, who aren’t voracious readers and committed students of English literature. That doesn’t mean that they always reach correct or appropriate solutions, or that they always work in good faith, of course. But I do think that they believe what they do contributes to the project of English scholarship.
I guess on a fundamental level I just feel that there is less damage done to texts than you assume; and while I find the results are often lacking in deconstructive readings, I don’t see any harm in the attempt. As far as principal texts outlasting deconstruction, it depends on what you mean. Of course Don Quixote or Lolita will be read and enjoyed long after people study decon at universities. (Decon is already out of vogue, or so it seems from where I’m sitting.) But I do think that there is an essential utility to the deconstructive enterprise that will survive: the position that you can’t escape language to describe language, and that no words or thoughts emerge ex nihilo. That, from my limited knowledge, is the most important facet of deconstruction, and it’s one that I think will continue to have value for people who study literature and language.
— Freddie · Apr 8, 07:38 PM · #
Freddie: I don’t think you’re accurately describing the key insight of deconstruction. The notion of the autonomy of language, and of texts, predates them. The New Critics were the champions of the autonomous text, and the enemies of the old-fashioned biographical criticism and the like. The deconstructionists came after, and went further.
Deconstruction wasn’t about killing the author; it was about killing the text. It wasn’t about the autonomy of the text; it was about the autonomy of the reader. It wasn’t about how language is independent of the world; it was about how language subverted itself, could not help but mean the opposite of what it intended.
On some level, of course, all the insights of deconstruction have some validity. Using a text against itself is a valid form of argumentation. But it’s a deflating way to read, a mode of reading that undermines one’s faith in the ability of an author to write.
I want to be clear: I’m not saying that deconstructionists were boring and naive relativists who believed there’s no such thing as value in literature. I agree that the deconstructionists read books, especially great books, and appear to value reading books. But they do not give themselves to their texts, do not allow books to read them; they demand to be in total control of the literary experience, and they trasmit a suspicion of meaning in the experience of reading that, I believe, is unhealthy for readers – and much more so for writers – to embrace.
By the way, I don’t disagree that they are now out of vogue, relatively speaking. But I was an undergraduate in 1990. They were not out of vogue then, so they never will be for me.
— Noah Millman · Apr 8, 08:24 PM · #
Lots of great comments. Let me come a little cleaner on my own takes on deconstruction. I’ll be serially brief. I enjoyed reading Derrida. I liked the intellectual ferment poststructuralism’s faddishness provided to my grad school years, even though I was in political theory and not literary studies. I was at Duke, in the 90s, where this stuff really did rule. Contrary to his own self-conception, though, I found Derrida somewhat monstrous, ethically, as a participant in philosophical debate – shifty, demagogic when necessary, with a tendency to deploy deconstructive maneuvers as a sort of sophisticated ad hominem. On older philosophical texts, his readings were often both rich and vicious. Of the consequences of deconstruction on the intellectual culture of the university, I think the most irksome was the systematic way in which Derridean methods were used to undermine debate itself, and how, into the void, came a tendency to argue from authority – the authority, typically, being Derrida, or Jameson, or Lacan, or Deleuze, or the hermetic experience of pick your marginalized subject position. I also hold against it that it was perhaps the final nail in the coffin of a certain naive ideal of aesthetic experience and liberal arts education, which I have an intense fondness for, precisely because of its ideality and naivete. Of its possible effects on the writing of literature, such as Noah points out, I can’t say for sure. I will say that I know of a couple of novels that seem clearly informed by French theory – White Noise, Toni Morrison’s Paradise – that I either really like or like the French theory aspects of. In his recent short stories, D. Foster-Wallace seems to have taken on a method of auto-deconstruction with results that are interesting at least. In short, I think, in the larger literary culture, it remains marginal enough that actual writers can elect whether to engage it or ignore it. Though Derrida liked to present deconstruction as a delicate operation of quasi-religious reverence, I think Noah’s right in how it actually worked – to elevate the authoritative deconstructive reader and annihilate the text. Among poststructuralist academics I knew, there was almost no focus on the text as an autonomous source of aesthetic experience. It was mainly a locus of symptoms manifesting behind the authopr’s back. I also think that deconstruction rests upon a philosophical assertion that is so unremarkable as to be quaint – i.e. that words are not identical with the things they signify. So – and Fish’s essay exhibits this in spades – deconstruction, in America at least, sought to turn the entire humanities apple cart upside down to disprove an epistemological position nobody has really held since early days of nominalism.
— Matt Feeney · Apr 8, 09:03 PM · #
Matt: I liked White Noise as well – but I thought it was making fun of this stuff, not participating in it!
— Noah Millman · Apr 8, 09:09 PM · #
Re White Noise, Noah, I would say that Delillo was having fun with it. The Hitler/Elvis Studies stuff has a whiff of culture-studies parody, but there’s all the postmodern drama about the workings of language (e.g., the various names for the “airborne toxic event”), and the supermarket scenes that seem inspired by Lyotard’s “postmodern sublime.” All this suggests that deconstruction’s best use was not interrogating texts but informing a comic-paranoid subgenre of literary fiction. (If I seem obsessively familiar with this book, I do really love it, but I also wrangled a way to teach it in a course that was, otherwise, totally un-fiction-related.)
— Matt Feeney · Apr 8, 10:30 PM · #
English professors understand that a lot of people would like to have their jobs — there are an awful lot of people who love good writing and would like to teach young people about good writing. There are all sorts of retired advertising copywriters and empty nester housewives and the like who could step in and teach college English classes well. So, professional English professors turned horrible writing by Derrida and the like into a barrier to entry to their profession. To get a job dealing with good writing, you now have to be able to put up with hatefully awful writing.
— Steve Sailer · Apr 10, 05:19 AM · #