Deconstruction is Accused of Privileging Textuality at the Expense of the Real World.
When any critical stance reduced to its core principles (especially when undermined by the less spectacular efforts of its practitioners), it becomes easy to caricature. Liberal Humanism can be painted as woefully naïve and with no redeeming features, whilst psychoanalysis can be mocked as the ‘hunt for the phallus’ and Marxism is an a=b, base/superstructure equation. Naturally, such essential impressions ignore the subtleties and insights of each stance. Deconstruction, catching the mixed scorn and fear of various traditional figures, has been particularly vulnerable to such ‘straw targeting.’ One such effort has been directed against the perceived nihilism of the technique (proving all texts ‘mean nothing’), and another finds itself underestimating Deconstructionists’ intellectual rigor. Perhaps a more valid critique comes when Deconstruction is on trial for a myopic viewpoint, ignoring ‘reality’ and concentrating on ‘textuality.’
Textuality itself implies multiple things. The first of those is perhaps the simplest: the condition of being a method of textual criticism. This in itself, of course, does not make Deconstruction particularly radical innovation – American New Criticism was also bent on examining literature as ‘object.’ Deconstruction is somewhat unusual, however, in severing traditional conceptions of author and reader and examining the interrelationship between the text itself and the codes which enable the text to function as a method of communication. This introduces a pair of essential departures from the New Critical tradition and reveals Structuralist roots. Firstly, context is introduced (and indeed becomes a vital component of Derrida’s linguistic theories), but in a very specific way. Instead of concentrating on, say, the relationship between contemporary political strife and concepts of agency and authority in a novel (as in historicism), Deconstruction adopts a more distanced, philosophizing perspective. Derrida, for example, is most interested in how literature (as a kind of autonomous textual object) exists in a form that can transcend and break from context by drifting free of “the set of presences which organize the moment of its inscription.”[1] Indeed, Derrida’s concept of iterability (ie, .the ability to be repeated, even in the absence of both addresser and addressee) is a central element of écriture and its inevitable indeterminacy. When history is introduced, it is (ironically, perhaps, considering the connection between Postmodernism and Post-Structuralism) in a rather generalized way: logocentrism, and the ‘metaphysics of presence’ as the continuous, unifying thread in Derrida’s analysis of the Western philosophical tradition. Deconstruction eschews traditional historicist ideas, seeing history not as an authority, but as part of contextual indeterminacy: “part of what Derrida calls la texte général.[2]”
The second exciting departure is that the textuality of New Criticism tended to relate their close reading analysis to a separate conceptual scheme, albeit an a-historical one. The meaning was drawn out. Deconstruction, on the other hand, turned the text in on itself. No longer immediately concerned with deciding what the text said (ie.creating a unified interpretation), a Deconstructionist points out internal conflict and contradiction, points of self-referentiality and intertextuality. The American Deconstructionists, in particular, used even more precise and microscopic analysis than was usual in New Criticism. Who but Hillis Miller would spend an entire essay drawing out the etymology of the single binary opposition between ‘host’ and ‘parasite’? Whereas New Critical textual approaches expand the text into an interpretation, Deconstruction collapses it into an impasse, aporia, paradox: the book enters the condition of the Cretan who says, “I am lying” and we can never determine whether he does or not.
Thus, it can be seen that Deconstruction is at once more aware of context and yet more rigidly textual than New Criticism. Both, however, are not particularly interested in sociohistorical scholarship or reconstructing an author’s intention. A Deconstructionists’ query is as to whether there is an author in the first place and (if there is) who is he or she? The same applies to all subjects. Indeed, in the essay Différance, Derrida points out that the speaking question only becomes such when he/she enters into the system of ‘rules’ which govern speech. Foucault, although not immediately traceable as a Deconstructionist, provides a similar analysis of the ‘author-function’ along Post-Structuralist lines. This, in turn, can lead to an even more radical notion: whether the subject – the ontological question – is also a function of discourse. This, of course, is the second implication of ‘textuality’: reality as textual.
It is worth noting Derrida’s own cautious words on this subject before examining the complex interface between discourse and reality: “the value of truth…is never contested or destroyed in my writings, but only reinscribed in more powerful, larger, more stratified contexts.”[3] It seems overambitious, therefore, to paint Derrida at least as a cartoonish ultrasceptic denying that the room around him as any substantial existence. However, what Deconstruction does say on the matter is very interesting. There are three ways in which reality can be construed as related to discourse.
The first is to say that all reality is constructed in the same way as a language, and is thus indeterminate. In its barest from, this does not seem to be the point-of-view of Deconstruction. Throughout Derrida’s work, the status of the referent (ie.the real object) and its distinction with the signified (ie.the corresponding thought-concept) are maintained. The idea of the trace, a pure trace, points to a pre-discursive world, albeit in the same insufficient way as ‘negative theology.’ And, if such a line of argument is taken, then there is an effective realist counter: whatever conceptual or linguistic scheme one possesses, however indeterminate, arbitrary, or relativistic, it does not determine what fits into that scheme. One may have conceptual categories for hares and rabbits or merely ‘furry creatures with floppy ears,’ but if there are no hares and rabbits, then all three types remain empty.
A more subtle possibility is more realistically attributed to Deconstruction. Although the world isn’t explicitly created as a language, our ways of perceiving it may well be. Thought, reflection, and classification are linguistic. There is only so far one can go with purely mathematical reasoning (although it might perhaps be argued that mathematics too is reducible to a semiotic analysis) and pure sensuality. To interact with or perceive the world and its events in any meaningful sense (particularly when attempting to general abstract systems, or historical ‘narratives’), one must make use of concepts, and concepts are linguistic. And, of course, Deconstruction is involved in taking such ideas to pieces, showing their inherent contradictions, how they do not fit into the contextual chain as we thought they did, how their etymology and rigid binary opposites taint them. A concept signals presence, and Derrida’s overarching theme was the way that existence depends on absence. The binary between presence/absence also hints at the equally binary nature of consciousness itself, particularly interiority/exteriority and self/other, on to which language maps its concepts. Whether this might also apply to any pre-linguistic self-awareness is an interesting possibility, and Derrida does invoke the unconscious as a repressed ‘other’ in the essay Différance. Whatever, it is clear that any conceptual framework is massively implicated with the ideas of différance and the analysis of presence and absence.
The first linguistic act, Derrida argues, had to create a sign, and a sign denotes the absence of the referent: “the circulation of signs defers the moment in which we can encounter the things itself, make it ours, consume it, expend it, touch it, see it, intuit its presence.”[4] The whole system depends on the notions of spacing, deferring, difference, and yet that which is seen to lock the entire system into a stable uniformity (the logos) is, of course, just a product of the system itself. It is a supplement for the irrecoverable origin which we sense must stand outside the system, and which we cannot articulate because of all articulation issues from the system. All our concepts (all the signifieds in the order) can only be articulated by signifiers. Thus language as a code is always lacking that validation that stops it from being merely an infinite play of signifiers defining more signifiers. We may point at a physical rabbit and link it with the signifier ‘rabbit’, but if we are to explicate the concept (ie.the signified) of ‘rabbithood,’ we must turn only to more signifiers (eg.furry, floppy-eared, munches carrots.) With no foundation, the system enters free space. This is best exemplified by a written text which (as potentially without addresser and addressee) symbolises the wider concept of écriture – code without validation, and the reassuring presence of speech and speaker.
Closely related to this is the trace, the notion that as each sign is formed, particularly in binaries, there is a remnant of the differences which actually give it meaning. This phenomenon undermines the idea that each concept can somehow stand-alone, autonomously, containing its meaning, its presence. When applied to the system as a whole, the trace is repressed by the logos: the logos giving the illusion that the whole system is grounded in presence. It is noted that both signifier and signified fall victim to this play, this tainting, this indeterminacy: indeed, Derrida deconstructs that much opposition: “in the last instance, the difference between signified and signifier is nothing.”[5]
Thus, we can see that Deconstructionists do have a point when if they say reality is discourse. They are not necessarily retreating into some form of immaterial idealism (indeed, if they made such firm metaphysical commitments, then they would come up against their own analysis. They can illuminate aporia, but they cannot pass through it, despite a consistent utopian longing for that state of ‘pluridimensionality.’) Instead, they are showing how the ways in which we conceive the world are bound up with discourse: both specifically linguistic discourse and perhaps more full sets of binary distinctions that may be amenable to Deconstructive analysis. Derrida’s critique of ego (paired with insights from Freud) is fairly typical: “the subject (in its identity with itself, its self-consciousness) is inscribed in language, is a function of language.” He also claims consciousness is, at its heart, a phenomenon of différance, ie, .self-presence, the conceptual self-awareness of ego. The Deconstructionist does not deny that self exists; however, he/she does suggest that self is inscribed, is conceptualized, in a series of contextual chains which make it a function of discourse. This is perhaps easier to grasp if we consider three different concepts: the Christian ‘soul’, the materialist/scientific self (the Identity Hypothesis: mind as reducible to the brain), and the Freudian tripartite model of ego, id, and super-ego. A notion of identity self-awareness is present in all three cases but conceptualised in vastly differing ways, produced by differing discourses. A Deconstructionist might then destabilize these concepts and conceptual schemes, undermining their terminology.
It is, of course, this act of destabilizing, which is the raison d’etre of Deconstruction, and brings up the third and final implication of ‘textuality.’ If the first was ‘the condition of about a text’ and the second ‘the condition of being like a text,’ then the final one is ‘the condition of functioning as a text.’ Basically, opponents of Deconstruction says it focuses far too pedantically on the minutiae of textual implications, forgetting that language operates effectively as a tool within recognized limits. This is a position often allied to philosophical theories such as Austin’s ‘speech-acts’ and Wittgenstein’s ‘language games.’ They claim Derrida is working on an entirely false ‘epistemology of language.’ As Eagleton remarks on a broader level: “Meaning may well be ultimately undecidable if we view language contemplatively, as a chain of signifiers on a page…words like ‘truth,’ ‘reality,’ ‘knowledge’ and ‘certainty’ have something of their force restored to them when we think of language instead of as something we do, as indissociably interweaved with our effective forms of life.”[6]
On one level, this objection is perfectly valid. The Deconstructionists are working to an agenda that is reductive. It would be a dull world if all criticism was Deconstructionist criticism – and Derrida admits intention and other classical modes must have their place for without them “critical production would…authorize itself to say almost anything.”[7] However, he and his followers do something exciting: they suspend the conventions of language, the common assumptions, and press forward regardless. (The objections of pedantry might equally be leveled at Hume’s epochal analysis of causality: after all, who would think to doubt cause-and-effect as a property of the real world?) As Derrida writes in Signature Event Context, even when a ‘performative’ analysis of language is put forward, a performative utterance still has to be linked in with an iterative structure (eg.the ritual of marriage), potentially drifting free of situational context. Similarly, in regard to ‘language games’, we might see the Deconstructionists as experimentally altering, removing, or mixing the rules to highlight how tenuous and conventional our usage of language is. The point to remember is that Derrida came from a philosophical tradition: his early work was on Husserl and Heidegger, and he owes a considerable debt to Nietzsche. Like all philosophers, he was unafraid of suspending conventional rules. This is something Abrams in his critique fails to understand: he appears to be under the impression that because Derrida’s analysis applies to implications beyond next conventions of language, it is invalid. Of course, it is the real potential of a text to drift free of these quick conventions (as an object-in-itself) that interests Derrida, as it characterizes the indeterminacy of écriture. (Indeed, Abrams persistently confuses écriture – code material without validating source – with graphic writing alone.)
Yet Deconstruction also provided some extremely valuable literary criticism, which shows that it is more than a philosophical ‘game.’ Derrida says it “attempts to make the not-seen accessible to sight”[8] whilst Johnson affirms: “Deconstruction is not synonymous with ‘destruction.’”[9] The accusations of frivolous textual hijack in the name of ‘infinite play’ are countered by De Man, who is described by Norris as acknowledging that “there must be an end-point to this dizzying regress.”[10] Some of the achievements of Deconstructionist scholarship are as follows. Firstly, in the face of virtually total opposition which demands any work be seen as an organic and self-coherent whole (any ambiguity resolving itself into a ‘deeper unity’) Deconstruction reveals textual resistance. Contradiction, paradox, conflict, aporia, impasse, gaps, confusion and reflexive undercutting are all the objects of study for Deconstructionist criticism. In an odd sense, its focus on etymology and internal logic make it (potentially) one of the most rigorously scientific modes of criticism. Meanwhile, in its persistent questioning of received values, it can become a revolutionary criticism. It does something new, in a new style, aiming not to obliterate the text, but to open new meaning. Whether it actually becomes formulaic, narrow and increasingly predictable is open to debate, but no critic can seriously wish to suppress discussion of a text. Its influence has been particularly valuable due to Derrida’s missionary zeal in stripping down binary hierarchies: the analysis of presence, absence and the trace of the ‘other.’ As the ‘other’ in literature have frequently been the sexually, economically and racially marginalised, the Deconstructionist project is clearly relevant.
When Derrida said that there was nothing outside the text, he was making a statement with a multiplicity of implications. He was stating his rigorously textual approach to literature, eschewing historical or psycho-biographical analysis (although never explicitly denying it.) He was hinting that human experience is itself far from autonomous, but that subjects (or rather the concepts of subjecthood) are themselves a product of discourse. He was signalling a focused attention the what it meant to confront a text: an object that could be ruptured from context, from addresser, from addressee: “cut off from all responsibility.”[11] This state of écriture – the essential fluidity of language, the way words play off multiple associated signs and hint at their own instability – is surely perceivable by even those who do not accept the finer points of Derridean linguistic analysis. Above all, he was pointing out that Deconstruction was not so much an independent critical theory, but rather an act of subversion from within the text, within the very linguistic structure it undermined. As Hillis Miller opines: “(the text) is unreadable, if by readable one means open to a single, definitive univocal interpretation….the deconstructionist reading contains the obvious one, and vice-versa.”[12] As a valuable questioning voice, cutting across the lines of communication in literature, Deconstruction must be granted its obsessive textual focus. It remains a powerful and much-maligned mode of criticism.
Bibliography
Between The Blinds: A Derrida Reader, ed.Peggy Kamuf (1991)
Jaques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Cahkravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1976)
Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (London, 1991)
Jonathan Culler, Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (London, 1983)
John M. Ellis, Against Deconstruction (Princetown, 1989)
Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader (2nd Edition), ed.David Lodge (London, 2000)
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (2nd Edition) (Minneapolis, 1996)
Peter Barry, Beginning Theory (Manchester, 1995)
[1] Jaques Derrida, Signature Event Context, collected in Between The Blinds: A Derrida Reader, ed.Peggy Kamuf (1991) p.92
[2] Jonathan Culler, Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (London, 1983) p.130
[3] Quoted in Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice (London, 1991) p.152
[4] Jaques Derrida, Différance, collected in Kamuf, p.61
[5] Jaques Derrida, (excerpts from) Of Grammatology, collected in Kamuf, p.39
[6] Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction – 2nd Edition (Minneapolis, 1996) p.127
[7] Jaques Derrida, Of Grammatology, translated by Gayatri Cahkravorty Spivak (Baltimore, 1976) p.158
[8] Ibid. p.163
[9] Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference, p.5, cited in Barry, p.71
[10] Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice, p.106
[11] Jaques Derrida, Signature Event Context, collected in Kamuf, p.92
[12] J. Hillis Miller, The Critic as Host, collected in Modern Criticism and Theory, 2nd Edition, ed. David Lodge (London, 2000) p.262