French Theory in America, Part Two

April 20, 2008,  8:08 pm

French Theory in America, Part Two



Well, there’s life in that old dog yet. My editor thought that a column on French theory would elicit a small number of responses from readers interested in continental philosophy. More than 600 comments later, it is clear that terms like deconstruction and postmodernism still have the capacity to produce excitement and outrage.

Some of the comments canceled each other out. A number of posters found my exposition unintelligible, jargon-ridden and poorly written. An equal number found the column straightforward, accessible and helpful as an account of a body of thought that had previously seemed abstruse and impenetrable. A third group (much smaller) complained that the very lucidity of the exposition constituted a betrayal of the theory’s insights because it suggested that deconstruction was itself an object that could be fully mapped out and mastered by an analyst surveying it from a distance. My essay fails, says Jeffrey Z, because “only a recursive writing on the level of Derrida’s …would be able to escape the act of imposing a structuralist framework.”

I take it that by “recursive writing” he means a writing that keeps doubling back on itself and refuses to proceed in a linear fashion toward a portable conclusion. This is certainly the case with many Derridean texts, which notoriously begin with a questioning of the notion of beginning and announce every few pages that the beginning is actually beginning only to go on and disappoint those readers who were seduced (momentarily) into thinking that in a few more sentences they would be in control of a consecutive argument. Derrida’s so-called obscurity is not willful or evidence of a disordered mind; it is the (anti)expository equivalent of the (non)lesson deconstruction teaches, and according to Jeffrey Z, I sin against the spirit of that (non)lesson by trying earnestly to rehearse it.

Of course, “we all,” he says, do the same thing. D certainly does it when he tells us that Derrida’s “language is performative”; that is, its own unfolding or, rather, refusal to unfold, is its message: “it is not so much in the ‘saying’ but in the ‘saying’ as ‘doing.’” D’s use of quotation marks tells us that we are not to understand the words they surround as we usually do in everyday writing and reading, but does not tell us what the alternative, better meanings are; for if it did that it would produce a new simple sense that would have to be put within quotations marks in turn.

Derrida sometimes called this “writing under erasure”: you receive the words but are blocked from finding either comfort or knowledge in their conventional or standard meanings. Derrida’s style, then, enacts the deconstructive point that meaning is always elsewhere, a point also insisted upon over and over again by those religious thinkers (like St. Augustine) who warn us against the almost inevitable sin of idolatry, the sin of mistaking a historical, limited, partial meaning for the true meaning which always escapes and exceeds its momentary instantiations.

Like the rigorous theological refusal to deify (or reify) what is secondary and created, deconstruction refuses to allow us to rest in what Rob terms the “images of presence”; instead it alerts us to the “trace of the unthinkable within the thinkable” and to the impossibility of ever getting to the unthinkable itself. Rob concedes that I may recognize the impossibility at some level but, he says, I fail to affirm it in my account, presumably because I am too busy (as I am now) trying to get it right.

Many posters thought that I got it wrong, especially when I declared that deconstruction has no political implications and does not mandate or authorize or subvert any course of action. Some made this assertion into a complaint: “it doesn’t do anything.” Or “one thing leads to another, and another, but no end is ever reached. Ken Nielson observes that while literary criticism “at its best seems to me to contribute to a …better understanding of a work,” theory “does not…do this.” No, it doesn’t. Theory, at least of the French kind, doesn’t do anything; or so I claim. Yes, it does, retorted many respondents, half of whom said it does something bad, while the other half said it does something good.

The first group insists that those subjected to deconstructive arguments risk having their most cherished beliefs taken away from them. B.J. Pryor observes that for many people the “Truth of certain propositions is the bedrock of their value systems and spring of their actions,” and if professors “teach … that there is no truth that can be apprehended, and that all human expressions are ‘socially constructed,’ how can their parents “not believe that those professors have undermined” their children’s faith in those truths? But deconstructive arguments undermine no truths or propositions except those propositions that make up a general account of truth, an account purporting to explain the emergence of the truths you will still hold to when the explanation has been given and has proven persuasive.

An account of truth is a very special accomplishment. Most people who are not philosophers don’t have one. That is, they don’t affirm truths because a theory of truth directs them to; they just believe that some things are true (and others false); and if you were to ask, “why do you believe that?”, they would respond by citing some survey, or some authority, or some statistic, or something they heard on talk radio. They would not respond by announcing a theory of truth, and if they did, you would be justified in saying, “I wasn’t asking for a theoretical account of truth in general; I was asking for a defense of the claim that this particular assertion — the Iraq war is going well; global warming is a man-made phenomenon; the housing crisis is over; regulation of guns reduces violence — is true.”

General accounts of truth fall under the category of epistemology — inquiries into how we come to know the facts and truths we routinely affirm. But paradoxical as it may seem, an account of how we know will have no effect on what we know. I may change epistemologies — that is, I may trade in my old realist or correspondence account of truth for an account in which truths and facts are the effects of systems of signifiers rather than of a direct encounter with an unmediated reality — but that change will not change my conviction that this or that particular thing is true.

The fact that I now have (in the sense of being willing to rehearse) a new epistemology will not alter my belief (if it is mine) that global warming is man made; for the reasons I hold that position would not include an abstract philosophical thesis about the ultimate source of my beliefs; rather, the reasons would include the usual mundane considerations of scientific measurements, the record of climate cycles, the pronouncements of prominent researchers, etc. No conviction of a particular truth — no conviction produced by the ordinary process of compiling, assessing and evaluating evidence in a limited field of inquiry — can be either validated or invalidated by a theory of truth in general. As RBK says, “Pragmatism gets us through life, not knowledge of truth.” No concrete proposition, wrote John Dewey, “follows from any general statements or from any connection between them.”

The mistake is to think that because a theory of truth is general in scope it has implications for questions of truth no matter where they arise. But theories of truth count only in the arena in which they are competing with other theories of truth, where the arguments made are not tested against the world, but against the arguments urged by rival theorists. The only thing that is different when one theory of truth supplants another (in the mind of an individual or in the corridors of the academy) is that different answers will be given to questions of epistemology; the answers given to any other questions will be what they were until some new piece of evidence in the field — and a theory of truth will not be one — proves persuasive.

When Alan Sokal challenged those who made deconstructive and postmodern arguments to jump from the window of his high-floor apartment, he assumed that their theoretical belief that facts are effects of discourse and not direct messages from the world would logically lead them to happily defy the fact of gravity. But the fact of gravity is known to them not by virtue of their commitment to any theory of truth — correspondence, coherence, perspectivist or whatever — but by virtue of the experiences they have had falling off a curb or of watching what happens when a flower-pot slips off a window ledge or when a tight-rope walker loses his balance.

These of course are the same experiences people who wouldn’t know a theory of truth if it hit them in the face will have had, and there is no difference at all between the reasons those happy innocents have for not jumping out of windows and the reasons postmodernist theorists have for not jumping out of windows. Reasons are reasons within particular arenas of inquiry and practice (and general theory is itself a particular arena of practice); they do not travel from one practice to another; they are not always and everywhere in force (except, perhaps, when they are reasons attached to a very strong theology).

So, the bottom line (a phrase I do not apologize for) is that deconstructive or postmodernist arguments don’t take anything away from anyone (except the ability to affirm arguments they have dislodged). But if deconstructive and postmodernist arguments don’t have the negative effects cited by their detractors, neither do they have the positive effects celebrated by their champions. They do not for example lead us to be less dogmatic because in hearkening to them “we acquire a ‘soft’ stance on what we believe to be ‘true.’ We stop believing that our truth is THE truth and so we are always open for dialogue.”

But (to make the point again) the degree to which our conviction of a truth is firm or soft will depend on how massive and conclusive the relevant evidence is, and an account of truth that flies far above any set of facts on the ground will not be relevant; you can’t get from it to any position on a disputed matter. As for “openness to dialogue,” we are more or less open to dialogue depending on the extent to which we think that a question is or is not settled. And if a settled question is to be reopened, it will not be because a general deconstructive doubt had been raised, but because a doubt has been produced by the invalidation of a specific piece of evidence (and remember general theories are not pieces of evidence) that had been considered conclusive.

If general theories of truth do not produce psychological states, neither do they produce the political tendencies that supposedly follow from those states. Nelson Alexander says that “In politics the ‘coherence theorist’ is obliged to be more tolerant and inclusive than the “correspondence theorist.”

No, tolerance will follow (or not) from an assessment of whether or not a particular piece of behavior is or is not harmful, and that assessment will not be mandated or even inflected by a theory of truth whatever its content; rather it will be the result of a consideration of empirical causes and effects. Depending on his or her history, education and political situation, someone who believed that truths emerged via a direct confrontation with a brute world could be the most tolerant of persons and, on the other side, someone who believed that the truths we affirm are relative to the vocabularies we employ at a given time could be the hardest of hardliners, and a hanging judge.

There is just no necessary or even likely relationship between one’s performance as a theorist and one’s performance in the polity. Paul de Man could have written those controversial essays, brandished triumphantly by several posters, had he turned out to be a card carrying analytical philosopher in the tradition of Frege and Russell; his early political/cultural views and his later theoretical views were independent variables. The answer to the question, What does it say about deconstruction that one of its celebrated proponents was arguably a Nazi sympathizer? is “Nothing.”

But even if deconstructive arguments do not mandate or generate particular political positions, do they not by alerting us to the socially constructed nature of any position encourage a progressive rather than a conservative politics? “The political power of deconstruction,” declares Robert Siegle, lies “in its ability to denaturalize what is typically assumed to be natural, or given.” The idea is that the insight that our convictions rest not on bedrock but on historically produced and revisable assumptions can be used to challenge claims that this or that practice (slavery, misogyny, anti-Semitism) is a reflection of the way things are and must be; it can be an engine against authority. “Once we acknowledge that we are dealing with constructions… then we can question what we are told.”

But the lesson that we are always dealing with and living within constructions is once again too general to be powerfully helpful. What is required if criticism of a settled authority is to be effective is a demonstration that the construction on which it rests is pernicious; demonstrating that it is a construction will not do the job, because as I said in my first column, you can’t criticize something for being socially constructed if everything is. As a general thesis about knowledge, deconstruction doesn’t do any work. It may be an invitation to work, but the work, if done, could well reveal that the challengeable assumptions underlying a conservative political position are ones you are inclined to embrace. I stand by my assertion that deconstruction does not and could not have a politics.

Those who argue otherwise must make constructedness into a matter of blame, as A does when he or she says that “An epistemology that so rigorously highlights the untenable foundations of ideas tends not to conserve those ideas.” But the vocabulary of tenable and untenable requires a vantage point from which that distinction could be made. It could no more be concluded on the basis of deconstruction that a foundation was untenable than it could be concluded that it was tenable. Deconstruction is just not in that line of judgmental and political work. It is not the answer to any empirical question. Tom nails it: deconstruction is “relentlessly ‘out of work.’”

What this means is that since deconstruction cannot provide us with a way of distinguishing between the socially constructed contexts it finds everywhere, it drives us back to those contexts and to the standards, protocols and evidentiary procedures that reside, however provisionally, within them. Not only does deconstruction not threaten anything or deliver anything, it doesn’t change anything. This is not to say that it is useless, just that its uses are properly confined to the ongoing conversation about epistemology in which it is a participant.

So what was all the fuss about? Partly it was about the contingent effects of a sexy new way of thinking that pretty much swept the field in a number of academic disciplines, something that had happened even more dramatically and quickly in the late ’50s and early ’60s when Noam Chomsky’s “Transformational Grammar” made walking ghosts out of previously celebrated academics in a matter of months.

It’s an old story — new kid on the block takes all the marbles — and it had its casualties, Ph.D’s trained in fields that were no longer hiring; scholars who could no longer get their work published, programs that died on the vine because students stopped flocking to them, students who were force-fed a bunch of stuff they couldn’t digest. And it also had its glories, new avenues of investigation opening up everyday, new heroes to put on a pedestal, new vocabularies to apply to old texts, new venues for publication, an exciting round of conferences, many of them taking place in exotic locations.

Those who were able to catch the wave could say with Wordsworth, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.” But these effects, good and bad, happy and unhappy, did not flow from deconstruction as a matter of right and property; they were effects of which deconstruction just happened to be the occasion.

It could have been something else, and no doubt in the not-too-distant future it will be.




Stanley Fish is the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor and a professor of law at Florida International University, in Miami, and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has also taught at the University of California at Berkeley, Johns Hopkins and Duke University. He is the author of 10 books. His new book on higher education, "Save the World On Your Own Time," has just been published.