Picture this: You're taking a little time between two loads of laundry to read "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey." It's a Saturday off, the kids are down for a nap, and you're enjoying some quiet time with Wordsworth. Then comes a knock. Through the obscure glass oval window in the door, you see a man in a suit waiting patiently. Thinking it's a Witness ready to hand you a copy of Awake! or The Watchtower, you open and the visitor holds out a book of philosophy and says in a French accent, "Here is a very complicated theory of language and meaning that has no consequences or practical application. Want to learn it?"
In his April 6th blog post "French Theory in America," Stanley Fish writes about deconstruction theory and its influence and effects in the American academy. One of his main points is that, despite the fact that deconstruction has been used for and against political, religious and social agendas, deconstruction theory as articulated by its originators (Derrida, et al) does not have any necessary practical consequences. Fish writes
"It doesn't take anything away from us. We can still do all the things we have always done; we can still say that some things are true and others false, and believe it; we can still use words like better and worse and offer justifications for doing so. All we lose (if we have been persuaded by the deconstructive critique, that is) is a certain rationalist faith that there will someday be a final word, a last description that takes the accurate measure of everything. All that will have happened is that one account of what we know and how we know it - one epistemology - has been replaced by another, which means only that in the unlikely event you are asked "What's your epistemology?" you'll give a different answer than you would have given before. The world, and you, will go on pretty much in the same old way."
There are three problems with Fish's argument:
- To say that there exists an unbridgeable separation between sign and signified, between language and the things that language describes, does have great consequences if it is really "true" (notice that Fish talks about whether or not deconstruction theory is valid while desperately avoiding the use of the words "true" or "false" to refer to it). As one friend of mine observed after reading Fish's article, reading the Constitution in light of deconstruction theory would have catastrophic practical consequences.
- If Fish is right, if deconstructionism in itself has no practical consequences and life will simply go on as long as people don't pervert deconstructionism for use in furthering their particular agendas, then why should anyone care about the theory?
- If deconstruction is indeed "true" or "right," then by its very nature it has an internal contradiction. Stated crudely, deconstruction theory says that there is no ultimate meaning in language, that there is an inevitable separation between words and the things words signify, that there is no such thing as truth or falsity outside of language; but we must use language itself to articulate the theory. As many critics of deconstruction have said before, isn't deconstruction theory invalidated by its own principles?
In philosophy there is a concept called the liar paradox. It involves statements like "This sentence is false," which swings like a pendulum between truth and falsity. If the sentence is true, then it is false; if it is false, then it is true. Deconstructionism seems to suffer from the same problem. And what can be made of a theory that tumbles in upon itself to infinity?
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1 comment:
I think that you're absolutely right, on several points. First, a theory that uses language to tell us that language has no menaing is self-contradictory, and not in a trivial sense. Second, the claim that we ought to make room for deconstruction in modern discourse and that simultaneously the theory is inconsequential is suspicious: in fact, it shows Fish to be the sophist that he is. The point of an assertion, for the sophists, is never about the truth of the assertion, since there is no such thing as inherent truth or falsity. Rather all assertions are claims to power. If adopting postmodernism as a hermeneutic helps you quickly and easily to say what has never been said before and therefore to achieve publication in important journals, why then you arrogate academic power to yourself, which is no inconsiderable thing. Finally, it turns out that one of the godfathers of deconstruction, Paul de Man, who taught for years at Yale, was actually a Nazi propagandist during the German occupation of his native Belgium. When this was discovered, you can imagine the standard postmodern defense of their hero: texts don't really mean what you think they do. In one sense the criticism is just: in the hands of deconstructionists, texts don't mean what we think they mean. Instead they exist in order to give the author power, whether as a collaborator with a genocidal regime universally vilified by the civilized world, or as a well-paid tenured academic helping to define what passes for wisdom in late twentieth-century America.
Thank you for your post.
--Stephen
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