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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Mark Bauerlein

Where Deconstruction Went Wrong

Last week, Stanley Fish had a long post at his New York Times blog on a new book out next month about French theory, mostly deconstruction, and American campus politics. (552 comments at this time.) The book is French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, but the subtitle is a bit misleading. The author, Francois Cusset, doesn’t think that French theory transformed U.S. intellectual life in its own image, but rather that, in a three-part drama, American academics distorted and institutionalized it, public intellectuals (mostly conservatives) reacted with alarm, and the campus-culture wars ignited. American professors distorted theory by adopting it as a movement, a program, a politics, an agenda, a reform. In their turn, conservatives erred in taking it seriously as a political enterprise.

Fish’s conclusion:

“The result is the story Cusset tells about the past 40 years. A bunch of people threatening all kinds of subversion by means that couldn’t possibly produce it, and a bunch on the other side taking them at their word and waging cultural war. Not comedy, not tragedy, more like farce, but farce with consequences. Careers made and ruined, departments torn apart, writing programs turned into sensitivity seminars, political witch hunts, public opprobrium, ignorant media attacks, the whole ball of wax.”

These charges and countercharges originated in a basic misunderstanding. At bottom, Fish says, theory was a critique of knowledge claims. It “interrogated” the ideal of “an independent, free-standing, knowing subject, the ‘I’ facing an independent, free-standing world.” Theorists found a glitch in the formula: The language used to describe things and frame experiments impinges on the facts. The “tools the mind employs” won’t get out of the way and allow reality to shine through.

Fish cites Bacon on the problem, and we could add Hegel, too (“if cognition is the instrument for getting hold of absolute being, it is obvious that the use of an instrument on a thing certainly does not let it be what it is for itself, but rather sets out to reshape and alter it”); and Kant on the Table of Categories (which forever exile us from things in themselves, whatever “they” “are”); and Nietzsche on “immediate certainties” (a quaint notion, he thinks); Heidegger on the “always already” . . .

Nietzsche is the key figure for Theory’s take on the problem, I think. For while most other philosophers acknowledged the epistemological problem and tried to devise methods and theories to overcome it, Nietzsche played with it and wouldn’t let it go. Derrida expanded Nietzsche’s negative critique into a full-scale nonstop method, a method against conclusion. No “center,” no “hors-texte,” no identity. Instead, we got decentering, textuality, and differance. Derrida termed it a “parasitic” activity.

That’s not the American way, however, says Cusset. Deconstruction posed “an endless metatheoretical regression,” but Americans want action and practice and politics. They got it wrong every time they implemented it as more than just a structural or conceptual analysis. Back in 1982 Derrida gave a talk at UCLA when I was a first-year grad student, and all I remember of it was a long-winded question that amounted to, “Why don’t you spend more time with Marx and be more political?” Derrida’s response: “Deconstruction could come from the Left, and deconstruction could come from the Right. It doesn’t have its own politics.”

I doubt if many people who consider themselves theorists would agree.

More on Fish’s post and Theory later.

Posted at 09:56:24 AM on April 10, 2008 | All postings by Mark Bauerlein

Comments

  1. While I have not read Cusset’s book, I do agree that the discussion of French Theory should take place against the backdrop of the last 2 centuries of continental philosophy. In fact, the defining idea of Theory for Professor Fish—the rejection of the independent neutral I that passively observes without affecting the object of observation—was put into its decisive form by Kant a little more than 200 years ago. What has happened since then—in the work of Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, etc.—has been a matter of working out various consequences and reinterpretations of that opening move. What is startling is that this same issue, so inflammatory when coming from continental thinkers, forms an important subject of debate within the analytic tradition too, namely, the issue of anti-realism. I trace this continental history and make connections to analytic philosophers in A Thing of This World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism. Forgive the plug, but it may help fill in some of the background.

    — Lee Braver · Apr 10, 11:32 AM · #

  2. Derrida himself (or itself) lamented the “turning into method” of his more ethereal “movement” of de-construct-ing. Americans try to get things done with things. It is much like French versus American porno—in the French version a naked man scales a 40 story building and appears, uninvited outside the window of a naked woman, who, being French, invites him in for coffee, whereupon, to the consternation of horny Americans viewing in some French hotel, the two of them proceed to talk about the meaning of life for an hour and a half (where’s the sex, the practical Americans lament!!!). In the American version, pumping rapidly reaches it unoriginal conclusion, unencumbered by feeling, sensation, reaction, subjectivity, objectivity, -tivities of any sort. Cusset and Fish, both, would have been wiser to put all this de-ing of things into a cross-cultural porno perspective. It both simplifies while bringing out the essence.

    — Richard Tabor Greene · Apr 11, 06:35 AM · #

  3. I guess the headline to this article would have to be considered part of the “ignorant media attack” problem. As Cusset tries to make clear, so far as I understand him, the headline should be “Where the American Academy Went Wrong in Understanding Deconstruction.”

    It’s a pity you can’t remember more about Derrida’s talk. The one time I got a chance to hear him speak, I was amazed by how gentle and generous he was both as a speaker and as a respondent to questions, some of which could be rather aggressive in their obtuseness. He always took the time to reframe a question into something he could answer, making sure to make the original questioner happy to have been attended to and thanking him or her for continuing the conversation.

    — John Laudun · Apr 11, 08:58 AM · #

  4. I wish we could frame this differently.

    “The ‘tools the mind employs’ won’t get out of the way and allow reality to shine through.” It is one thing to assert that “the tools the mind employs” don’t get out of the way completely and so, to some extent, distorts reality. It is another to claim that none of reality ever gets through at all. The latter makes all scientific inquiry pointless — and, for that matter, my search in the cupboard for cereal for breakfast. The former points us to further important questions about method and validity.

    Failure to distinguish more clearly between these two has exacerbated the public debates. (Do those people in the English department really believe that there are no “real” students in their classes? If so, do we need to give them a “real” paycheck?)

    — Jim · Apr 11, 11:10 AM · #

  5. Like Jung’s flippant but ultimately correct conclusion that psychoanalysis was a Jewish science, most theories cannot escape the culture from which they arise. Deconstructing deconstruction, like the snake head eating its tail, turns back upon itself, forming an endless loop of Mandelbrotian permutations, two dimensionally identical and yet unique in a space-time continuum. In other words, what are the three things one should look for when shopping deconstruction? Neighborhood! Neighborhood! Neighborhood! Deconstruction never went wrong, it just went.

    — the first marci · Apr 11, 11:14 AM · #

  6. Is there a connection between the deplorable state of working conditions in the teaching of the humanities and the so-called “revolution” that the decons “led”? Perhaps hard to say, but one thing is clear: there were those high flying theorists, quite well paid and “esteemed” as models who, at least to my knowledge, have never done anything to make a difference in the proletarization of teaching, particularly in higher ed.

    Russell Jacoby’s book, DOGMATIC WISDOM, hardly a right wing critique, remains a fine assessment of the decons and the general hubristic pomo claim to be novel (any students of Kenneth Burke or even RS Crane will not have been fooled.) It is also a good warning not to take sophists like Fish seriously.

    It has always seemed to me that the basic mistake decons make is that they treat works of imaginative literature as appealing to us in the same way philosophic arguments do and thus hold such texts to innapproriate logical standards of coherence. One feels, finally, that these people simply do not really like literature, are suspicious of its attractions and regard it as a prompt for their own narcissistic cleverness. That is why some of the most interesting and justly appreciative (but not uncritical) attention to literature these days often comes from people in other disciplines.

    I say this as someone who has studied theory, believes it is worthwhile to do so, but who also believes that it has become so overvalued as to displace the value of paying attention to the claims primary (oops, bad word) literary texts about which it remains forever suspicious.

    — George T. Karnezis · Apr 11, 11:47 AM · #

  7. ‘That’s not the American way, however, says Cusset. Deconstruction posed “an endless metatheoretical regression,” ‘

    Forgive me for being cynical, but could the next line of this thought be: “and therefore an endless series of dissertations, journal articles, books, and presentations that create an endless series of offers for tenure?”

    — JS · Apr 11, 02:12 PM · #

  8. Mr. Greene – Your comment had me HOWLING with laughter – a “cross-cultural porno perspective”? Are you sure you’re not actually John Waters writing under a pseudonym? By the way – I’m not criticizing you – I happen to enjoy John Waters’ acid wit tremendously.

    — Mark Koenig · Apr 11, 02:27 PM · #

  9. But for the “naked” and “40-story building” parts, the film described by commenator 2 is a dead-ringer for “Ma nuit chez Maude” (“My Night at Maud’s”), one of the most erotic of Rohmer’s films. Oh, and Maud is a brunette — another cultural difference.

    Yes, thank you for the flashback….

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 11, 06:07 PM · #

  10. Am I right that this is an article about a review of a book about deconstruction? Yawn.

    — UndergroundProf · Apr 11, 06:38 PM · #

  11. “Am I right that this is an article about a review of a book about deconstruction?”

    “That depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is.” – Bill Clinton

    “Mission accomplished.” – George Bush

    “Deconstruction could come from the Left, and deconstruction could come from the Right. It doesn’t have its own politics.” – Jacques Derrida

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 11, 06:49 PM · #

  12. I’m very glad to find the Derrida quote at the end of your column. I do consider myself a “theorist,” and for a long time I have argued these exact two points: that deconstruction needs to be read against the background of continental philosophy (or that, at the very least, when reading Derrida on Kant, say, one should pay him the courtesy of first reading the Kant text he discusses)—and, secondly, that deconstruction is falsified when used as a political tool (specifically, of the left), inasmuch as, in order to do so, one has to pretend that the ideological ground of one’s own political beliefs is immune to it. In much of what came to be known as theory, deconstructive methodologies were made subservient to an ultimately Marxist perspective, thereby misreading the actual reach of Derrida’s thought. I should add that I’m saying this as a pretty much run-of-the-mill academic left-winger—but that this last point, especially, has been perceived by some as “reactionary” or worse.

    — abm · Apr 14, 02:57 AM · #

  13. The comment below related to this topic was censored from a thread at “The Valve” (www.thevalve.org) on 4/27/08:

    The physicist considers him/herself—usually a himself—to be a specialist in the academic field that is at the height of all knowledge. All other fields are “below” physics, or considered to be its hand-maidens (mathematics, etc.). So, when physicists discuss physics “in plain English”, they consider it to be a cross between the generosity of a rock-star interview and kindly aristocratic condescension.

    The irony of the PhD in physics as the “ultimate” doctor of philosophy is that only the greatest of physicists understand themselves to be philosophers.

    English professors, on the other hand, have always suspected that all disciplines are the hand-maidens of philosophy, the supreme essence of the pursuit of knowledge—and so it has been that the most rarefied of literary criticism has been the hand-maiden of philosophy.

    Thus, the reign of Derrida in literature departments (Comparative and English, etc.) was the shot-gun marriage of philosophy and literature with their “natural” child, criticism—but the interpretation/application of his philosophy evolved into a means of distanciation (“differance”) from rather than confrontation with and analysis of the nature of language and the real world.

    Thus, the scandal of de Man’s anti-Semitic war-time writings, revealed after his death, became the beginning of the end of the reign of criticism. For suddenly, the acolytes were scrambling to defend the edifice of criticism’s philosophical distanc-ing against the assault of accusations of self-interest, of bad faith—of inhuman politics.

    Suddenly, the seemingly impenetrable was strikingly un-masked—and the world was given the sad spectacle of even the Jewish Derrida performing the dance of a bricolage of his friendship with de Man and his desire for a redemption from betrayal.

    The English Department’s ever-spiraling descent into a kind of supreme solipsism has never really been rescued since. The death, then, of Derrida has signaled the end of the era of the philospher critic as would-be public intellectual—in this country at least.

    Whether that is a good thing or a bad thing doesn’t seem to matter to the American public—a public which has increasingly witnessed the distanc-ing language games of critics become the everyday language games of politicians—to the detriment of us all.

    — Anti-hypocrisy advocate · Apr 30, 03:18 PM · #

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