Percy-L: Literary, Religious, Scientific, and Philosophical Discussion of Walker Percy

[<Robert_Pauley AT oxy.com>]

Title: Message

Thanks sending for this along. I it enjoyed.

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From: percy-l-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org [mailto:percy-l-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of JHForest AT cs.com
Sent: Tuesday, October 07, 2003 4:51 AM
To: percy-l AT lists.ibiblio.org
Subject: [percy-l] Does Deconstruction Have a Future?

A friend passed in California this along to me.

Jim

* * *

Does Deconstruction Have a Future?

Dr. Donald DeMarco
St. Jerome's University

Universities, despite their professed dedication to the classics, are as
likely to be influenced by passing fads as the barometer is by changes in
the atmospheric pressure. One of the more pernicious fads that has
influenced higher education over the past few decades is deconstruction.
The underlying assumption of deconstruction is that linguistic expressions
are so inherently ambiguous that they can be analyzed and discussed
endlessly without anyone ever being able to decide what it is that they
mean. Undecidability, then, becomes the essential character of any literary
text, not meaning.

The current deconstruction fad owes much to the thought of Jacques Derrida
(1939- ), whose essay "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the
Human Sciences" (1966) and his book Of Grammatology (1967) provide
its theoretical framework. In these works, Derrida attempts to show that
any text (a philosophical treatise, a poem, a polemic, or even an exercise
in deconstructive criticism) can be interpreted in ways that are
fundamentally at variance with, contradictory to, and subversive of what
may be viewed as a stable and coherent meaning.

His famous maxim, "Il n'y a rien hors du texte" ("There is nothing but the
text") indicates that a text has no point of reference beyond itself. There
is only, so to speak, "wall-to-wall textuality".

To deconstruct is to debunk, unmask, demystify, strip the text of any
reference to the transcendent. It does not elucidate. There does not exist
any "real world" to be elucidated. It, too, is merely a text. The great
enemy of deconstruction is something they call "logocentrism," particularly
the "logos" or "reason" celebrated in the Gospel according to St. John.
Deconstructionists are not children of the "light".

To anyone who sees language as an opening to a world of real values,
deconstruction is simply a path to nihilism. In this regard, the late
novelist Walker Percy has said that the whole deconstructive enterprise is
nothing more than an attempt to get rid of God by first disposing of
grammar. Nonetheless, part of the allure for the deconstructionist is that
it presents escape from the "closure of knowledge". The open-ended
indefiniteness of textuality--"placing [everything] in the abyss" (mettre
en abîme) -- offers the intoxicating image of the abyss as freedom, of
never hitting bottom. As a consequence of their eager acceptance of
undecidability and their fondness for putting words under erasure (sous
rature), deconstructionists do not experience despair, but allegedly
emancipate themselves from the tyranny of all authority while crediting
themselves with unbound creativity. It is nihilism, so to speak, with a
happy ending.

"Reduced to its simplest terms and taken to its logical conclusion," writes
David Thibodaux in The Cloning of the American Mind," deconstruction is
basically the notion that language is a hopelessly imperfect vehicle for
the _expression_ of ideas, and because words have no inherent meaning,
"meaning" - all meaning is relative."

Deconstruction is virtually synonymous with the post-structuralism of the
postmodern world. It claims that the major structures by which we organize
our thought are neither natural nor inevitable, but artificial
constructions. It promises, therefore, to rouse us out of complacency and
naïveté so that we see nothing more than what the text can justify.

Perhaps the earliest known deconstructionist is the ancient sophist,
Gorgias of Leontini (died 375 BC), a contemporary of Socrates. Being
more concerned with rhetoric than reality, more enamored by words
than wisdom, he wrote a treatise entitled Of Nature or the Non-Existent in
which he used the power of the word to deconstruct the world. He reasoned
as follows: since non-existence is non-existence, non-existence is.
Therefore, non-existence is and its opposite, existence is not.

Gorgias went on to assert that even if anything did exist, we could
not know it, and in the unlikely event that we could know something, we
could not communicate it.

Many critics of deconstruction have labeled it as an intellectual fad, an
academic cult, a philosophy of the absurd, or more imaginatively, as in the
words of critic David Leyman, "the sguiggle of fancy French mustard on the
hot dog of banal observation". Screenwriter Mark Horowitz expresses his
disdain for deconstruction by saying of his French contemporaries, "We sent
them Jerry Lewis, so they retaliated by sending us deconstruction and
Jacques Derrida."

Walter Jackson Bate, Harvard's most prestigious literary critic, sees
deconstruction as representing "a nihilistic view of literature, of human
communication, and of life itself." Rene Wellek, author of a six-volume
work on the History of Modern Criticism, makes the comment that "Recent
varieties of skepticism lead literally not only to the 'deconstruction' but to
the destruction of all literary criticism and scholarship."

Walker Percy may have produced the most trenchant criticism of
deconstruction. He views the typical deconstructionist as a academic
who claims that texts have no referents, yet leaves a message on his
wife's telephone answering machine requesting pepperoni pizza. The message
is a text and the pizza is a referent. The true deconstructionist (if there
could be one), however, since he loves to erase words, would have his pizza
message deconstructed by the telephone answering machine's self-erasing
tape. He would have successfully deconstructed his text. But he should not
be surprised when his pepperoni pizza fails to materialize.

Allan Bloom states in The Closing of the American Mind, a book that
remained on the New York Times best-seller list for over 30 weeks, sold
900,000 hardcover copies in its first year in print, and was named the New
York Times Book Review's "Notable Book of the Year," that deconstruction
"is the last predictable stage in the suppression of reason and the denial
of the possibility of truth in the name of philosophy." "This fad will
pass," he goes on to predict, "as it has already in Paris."

The continuing success of Bloom's book and the reforms that it continues to
inspire offer hope. The response to The Closing of the American Mind by
deconstructionists themselves exposes their own duplicity. Bloom himself
found it somewhat amusing, though most revealing, that deconstructionists,
apostles of undecidability that they proclaim to be, needed little time in
deciding that The Closing of the American Mind is "sexist," "racist,"
"elitist," and so on. "The violence and passion of the reaction" to his
book, in Bloom's words, made it even more evident that deconstruction
is more of a cult than it is a legitimate form of criticism.

In his review of Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the
Humanities, Andrew J. Angyal, who is a professor of English at Eton
College in North Carolina, also sees hope. He finds that the excesses of
deconstruction have caused it to lose its credibility and believes that "a
strengthening of public education and a healthy skepticism about
intellectual fads and trends within the profession will help to restore sanity
and balance to the humanities and help them to regain a sense of their
traditional mission and purpose within the liberal arts education."
Deconstruction will achieve its final objective in deconstructing its own future.

* * *