source file: mills2.txt Date: Tue, 3 Dec 1996 14:23:15 -0800 Subject: De-obfuscatory remarks (demystifying deconstruction) From: gtaylor@heurikon.com (One Cointreau, on ice....) I can't believe it. I got a note from someone on the list who I've never met who seems to have remembered me as an idjit who spends his time trying to explain critspeak PoMo stuff that Brian disses in English (MOI?), and who has taken me to task for not bothering to explain deconstruction ("Forget this sociolinguistic crap", quoth he). Can you imagine some poor soul who might actually *care* about this stuff enough to ask about some cockamamie term like "deconstruction" that's not even been in the recent McLarenist quiver? I've suggested that the boy take a hot toddy and sit down with a copy of Harry Partch's "Genesis of a Music" until things return to normal (there's no substitute for the Great Books, after all). In the meantime, I can imagine that there's some bearing between an attempt to define deconstruction as a method (small "d") and Brian's recent pronouncements on what X "means." So I'll do it quietly and then go away to contemplate Neil Haverstick's comments on matter and spirit. The term is actually pretty old - it dates from the late 60s and early 70s. The name was given by Jacques Derrida. I suppose that if there's a "method" to it (and this is a bit of a problem, since we're talking about a *collection* of ISMs rather than a single orthodoxy), it would more or less look something like this: 1. Find what seems to be a simple binary opposition in a given text, and demonstrate that the opposition is not merely linguistically described as an "other", but rather as a "lesser other" or hierarchial pair. One might try this with a pair of "others" in J. Murray Barbour as a stretch - provided you could collapse the whole book's polemics into ET and "those other things." [which are always described according to the degree to which they approach ET]. 2. Do something which tries to tease out the language which, in the guise of "mere description" or "style", could actually be shown to be doing something else. The usual way that deconstruction goes about doing this involves "playing" with the language itself - using semantic ambiguity or some other kind of linguistic feature (an etymology which can be read two ways, for example) to do so. Lots of folks who claim to "do" deconstruction argue a lot about whether this part of it is "created" or "discovered" (that is, whether or not the problem is that one is merely teasing out something which is already present in the language itself, but I hope you sort of get the idea. As an example, one might seize on some lengthy bit of McLarenist fulmination which kept referring to "harmony," in some form, and then refer constantly to the term in its "social" context - making the point that McLaren's use of language in describing those positions with which he is in disagreement [the usual calls for the banishment of anyone he personally doesn't happen to like] is the language of banishment and obliteration...putting the "harm" in "harmony", as it were...in fact, suggesting that his position has nothing to *do* with harmony. 3. Having had one's fun with subverting and monkeying with the original "real" meanings of things, one returns to the more serious business of reworking the original stealth hierarchy one started with in a way which preserves more of a sense of difference. The first time I heard the stuff done rather than listening to one of my colleagues oafishly parody it, I was pretty surprised that there actually *was* something beyond the wordplay. Simply put, I think it often goes something like this: "The language at work here has as a major goal the notion of convincing you that there's a simple connection between 'words' and 'things', so that you'll accept a bunch of other metaphysical baggage amenable to the arguer's position. I think that's misleading - I think that the best we can do is to remind ourselves that *any* attempt at the use of language will do that - even *mine.* The best one does in that case is to remind ourselves that *all* of us deal with language as an intersubjective phenomenon - intersubjective in the way that music is, if you will. The best system is the one which reminds us that language tends first and foremost to wind up referring to itself and the score of other possible meanings as much or more than to "things in the world." That's really more or less all one does. While I don't care for the technique personally, I think this is a reasonably fair and balanced account of how it more or less works. What I appreciate about the position and method itself is the sense that it explicitly deals with the "imbedded" nature of language - that is, it seeks at its best to remind us that language in a given piece of writing as often as not isn't merely about a set of denotative meanings. And, as you can imagine, most decon types don't spend their time berating you for not using a dictionary definition. Let a hundred phrases bloom, Gregory _ I would go to her, lay it all out, unedited. The plot was a simple one, paraphrasable by the most ingenuous of nets. The life we lead is our only maybe. The tale we tell is the must that we make by living it. [Richard Powers, "Galatea 2.2"] Gregory Taylor/Heurikon Corporation/Madison, WI Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Wed, 4 Dec 1996 00:00 +0100 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA18368; Wed, 4 Dec 1996 00:01:59 +0100 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA18411 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id PAA13240; Tue, 3 Dec 1996 15:01:56 -0800 Date: Tue, 3 Dec 1996 15:01:56 -0800 Message-Id: <199612032300.AA08347@interlock.wdni.com> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu