Derrida and Jelinek
Oct. 10th, 2004 10:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
Two major events in the world's intellectual landscape this week -- Elfriede Jelinek's Nobel Prize for Literature and the death of Jacques Derrida -- have meant a lot to me. I've read Jelinek's 'The Piano Teacher' (the prize is great news for her British publisher, Serpent's Tail) and even wrote a song-sketch in the early 90s called 'Wonderful, Wonderful Times' after her 1990 novel of the same title (it's about her nation's participation in the crimes of the Third Reich). For me personally, what's important about Jelinek is her political engagement, her bloodhound-keen nose for cant, and her elliptical, stubborn prose style. I see her as a direct descendent of Brecht, but also a colleague of spiky, desurgent, intractable Austrians like Thomas Bernhard and Peter Handke. Her drama is more direct and political than her novels -- she's written a play attacking the current Iraq war, Bambiland. (To see the Brechtian influence, check out these pictures of the production of her play 'Stecken, Stab und Stangl' at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus, Hamburg. Her website has a lot of polemical writings and production photos.)
Derrida's death made the front page of the New York Times. It will certainly get the front page of tomorrow's Liberation, which provided far and away the best coverage of Jelinek's Nobel Prize, including an interview with her french translator entitled 'An almost unbearable darkness'.
The British coverage of both these events has been much more superficial, focusing on incidentals rather than the actual concerns of their work. Jelinek is seen as a feminist by BBC World Service (a propaganda station which tends to use human rights as a stick to beat muslim, communist and developing nations with) and, between the lines, her prize is presented as a token 'gesture to women writers' on the part of a guilty Stockholm. The Observer article reporting Derrida's death was even worse. Instead of giving an account of deconstruction, it told us that Derrida had invented post-modernism (untrue: the term was first used by architectural writers like Charles Jencks and Robert Venturi), and, instead of giving any kind of account of Derrida's ideas, told us funny stories; how Derrida had found a rabbit stew described on a menu as 'deconstructed', how his big ambition had been to be a professional soccer player, how twenty philosophers had tried to veto his honorary degree at Cambridge.
This reaction is, I have to say, typically British. Anecdote is empirical, and therefore 'trustworthy' in a culture which distrusts big ideas, and especially French ones. But anecdote is also part of the glitzy, superficial world of celebrities and surface which the anglo-saxon world mostly calls 'culture' these days. In a kind of anorexic-bulemic cycle, periodic self-criticism for these tendencies does nothing to stop them. In the same Observer which reports Derrida's death, David Aaronovitch reviews Frank Furedi's book 'Where Have All The Intellectuals Gone?' in an article headlined 'The Thinking Classes: Too Clever By Half?' You can actually see stasis and the status quo returning in the space of the article: Aaronovitch tells us that Furedi (a Marxist) thinks education has suffered from being too inclusionary, then calls Furedi exclusionary. Back to where we started! Aaronovitch, writing in a Sunday paper, quotes Furedi telling us that intellectual life in Britain has a 'Sunday supplement feel', then accuses Furedi of being 'an example of what he himself decries. His list of publications reads like a Sunday supplement flat-plan.' Back to where we started again!
There's been a series of articles in the London Review of Books recently by Perry Anderson describing the fall of France as an intellectual avatar -- Aaronovitch mentions it in his article, speaking of 'a France that now produces zip. Or, in Anderson's opinion - in the shapes of Bernard-Henri Lévy and Michel Houellebecq - worse than zip.' Well, France only produces zip if you look in the wrong places. I refer to, and disagree with, Anderson's thesis in an article on the Paris music scene I've written for the November issue of Index magazine. France may be losing its generation of philosophical giants (only Levi-Strauss, Virilio and Baudrillard now remain of a generation which included Barthes, Lacan, Foucault, Aron, Braudel, Debord, Deleuze, Lyotard, Bourdieu and Derrida) but in music and fine art it's currently very strong. What's more, French coverage of literature, cinema, philosophy and other cultural stuff is, as Jelinek and Derrida show, far ahead of anything British journalists seem able to manage.
Since my brother is one of Britain's leading writers on deconstruction, I thought I'd try and correct the poor reporting of Derrida's ideas by reproducing a passage from 'Difference', Mark Currie's book in Routledge's series 'The New Critical Idiom' (2004). Giving an account of the shift from structuralism to post-structuralism, Mark describes 'the liberation of difference from opposition':
'To oversimplify the case for a moment, it could be said that the binary opposition was for people who could only count to two. For example, the idea that the meaning of the word 'day' inhered entirely in its relation to the word 'night' was somewhat reductive because it excluded consideration of the many gradations between night and day, excluded the difficult relations on the margin between them, such as dawn and dusk.'
I'd add -- and I might be confused here -- another complication to the binary opposition that Mark leaves out: that the opposite of a word can change with context. The opposite is not fixed. 'Day' can be, according to context, the opposite of other semantic units than 'night'. What about 'week' (as in 'Some are paid by the day, some by the week'), or what about 'never' (as in 'He'll be famous one day.' 'No, never.')?
Mark continues: 'In Derrida's work, and in that of many cultural and literary critics who followed his ideas, there is always a sense that an opposition is no innocent structural relation but a power relation, in which one term dominates another. Even in the case of an opposition as apparently rooted in nature as night/day, there is a hierarchy which ascribes privilege, priority and positive value to one term at the expense of the other. Indeed the very idea of otherness comes to signify this power relation, this secondary and derivative position that one sign acquires in relation to another... Poststructuralist approaches to the binary opposition produce a kind of critique that unmasks power relations, that seeks to oppose hierarchy, that refuses to isolate the sign from the discourse in which it operates, or for that matter that refuses to isolate the opposition from the more general discursive context in which its associative and suggestive potential is formed. If we take these two developments together, the liberation of difference from opposition on one hand, and a kind of critique that exposes hierarchy as it operates in discourse, we have a useful preliminary account of the characteristics of what came to be known, in the 1970s, as deconstruction.'
'In Positions (1981), Derrida describes deconstruction's approach to binary opposition as having three phases. The first phase is the exposure of a hierarchy, of the assumed superiority of one term over the other; the second phase is the reversal of that hierarchy, that is, the promotion of the secondary and derivative term to the position of superiority for strategic reasons; and the third phase is the reinscription of that opposition, which involves the disruption or reconfiguration of the difference between the two terms.'
Mark's account of Derrida points out something the British obituaries haven't -- his subtle but persistent political engagement, something he shares with Jelinek. I leave you with a Quicktime movie of Derrida talking on the subject of politics and friendship at the University of Sussex (in English):
Jacques Derrida on Politics and Friendship (Size: 47MB, duration: 80 mins.)
If you want to load the video directly into Quicktime and play it bigger, the direct path to the .mov file is here. It's worth watching to the end if only for the Question and Answer session in which Derrida quips 'We won't change the world before two o'clock!'
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-10 02:09 am (UTC)Bye,
Bush Speech Writer.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-10 02:11 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-10 02:58 am (UTC)You just know that she's going to spend her million Nobel euros well.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-10 04:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-10 04:29 am (UTC)My gut tells me that your insight belongs more to semiotics than deconstruction because it's an example of the arbitrary relation of signifier to signified. One can imagine a language where 'day' meaning the daylight hours and 'day' meaning a period of 24 hrs are represented by different sets of sounds.
False philosophy
Date: 2004-10-10 04:48 am (UTC)The people who seem most able to identify truth are children or those who are child-like in their thinking. Why should the Truth have been made difficult for all people to understand? To believe so is to believe that its author does not want us to understand(!) Simple people can understand the Truth because they are simple in their thinking. Complicated people cannot understand simplicity and are therefore lost in complexity. As a result, they are desparate for someone to help them find a way out and are easily duped by false philosophy.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-10 04:49 am (UTC)Day not opposite of night?
Date: 2004-10-10 04:54 am (UTC)Re: False philosophy
Date: 2004-10-10 04:57 am (UTC)If philosophy was just about helping people all philosophers would be working in soup kitchens. Surely the job is all about thinking things over?
Re: Day not opposite of night?
Date: 2004-10-10 05:00 am (UTC)Re: Day not opposite of night?
Date: 2004-10-10 05:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-10 07:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-10 07:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-10 07:31 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-10 08:10 am (UTC)Good post, Nick. Thank you.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-10 08:23 am (UTC)I'm not even sure the Observer prints obituaries, in fact - the Guardian usually has them all during the week.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-10 08:39 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-10 09:30 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-10 09:36 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-10 09:51 am (UTC)I very much enjoyed your brother's lucid exposition of deconstruction. I think the most common error people make about deconstruction is seeing it as a system or a systematic method, when it is neither. People also forget about the 'third phase', the 're-inscription', which keeps deconstruction from being exclusively destructive of the possibility of comprehension.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-10 10:06 am (UTC)That's very much the thrust of this attack on Derrida (http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-goldblatt011603.asp) by the right wing National Review. Writer Mark Goldblatt says:
'Deconstruction carries a distinct political advantage for the intellectual Left. When words no longer retain their common sense meanings, then any statement of truth becomes suspect. (Is Mark my first name?) What could be handier, if you can't make a reasonable case for what you believe, than a theory which seems to undermine reason itself and thereby relativizes all knowledge? Thus, for example, if you're a multiculturalist, you can argue — against historical evidence — that Greek philosophy is derived from sub-Saharan Africa; or if you're a feminist, you can argue — against biological evidence — that gender is entirely socially constructed; or if you're a Marxist, you can argue — against experiential evidence — that socialism is compatible with individual rights.'
This is of course a misleading argument. Deconstruction is not a way of turning water into whatever wine you want it to be, but a way of looking into how language generates meaning, and what power relationships exist in it. At the bottom of the article there's a telling little biographical tidbit:
'Mark Goldblatt's satire of black hip-hop culture, Africa Speaks, has just been released in paperback.'
Well, it's just as well he's descredited those who 'take up word play to show how every previous critic's own political agenda lurks behind what he perceived as the plain meaning of the text.' Otherwise that harmless satire -- pure empirical common sense, by the sound of it -- might look like it had a political agenda behind it.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-10 11:18 am (UTC)'Humane' satire tends to juxtapose overlapping authoritative discourses to reveal incongruities; this allows for what Derrida's contemporaries called "ideological intervention", but only if the reader is so disposed.
This idea of humane satire is obviously influenced by deconstructive thought, but I hope that I can argue that exposing incongruities, internal contradictions, aporia of both language and custom, is in fact not nihilistic or destructive of value, but profoundly humanistic. I think Derrida would agree, although with several pages of incomprehensible qualifications.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-10 11:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-10 11:26 am (UTC)'Satire allows you to put incongruous stuff together and still make it work, because it allows you the distance of irony. In satire, the status of each object is fuzzy. It's unclear whether you're putting something in your song -- a national anthem, a criminal confession -- to salvage or to savage it. You may approve, you may disapprove. Nobody really knows. You probably have mixed feelings. The fuzzy status of cultural objects in satire forces people to suspend their usual category-mindedness and just enjoy the incongruity and strangeness and bastardisation for its own sake, without reflex judgements. (I may be talking about a particular kind of satire here, the kind I favour: satire delivered by an unreliable narrator.) It's a bit like walking around in a big, pluralistic modern city.'
Re: False philosophy
Date: 2004-10-10 01:36 pm (UTC)Yes, philosophy is about thinking, but isn't thinking useless unless it has a purpose? And the closer that purpose is to the promotion of life - rather than the promotion of death (i.e., confusion, etc.) - then the better it obviously is, since thinking is only posisble for the living.
Working in a soup kitchen is by no means contrary to philosophy, in fact if more philosophers did it they might come a bit closer to reality (truth).
Re: Day not opposite of night?
Date: 2004-10-10 02:10 pm (UTC)Re: False philosophy
Date: 2004-10-10 02:11 pm (UTC)Thinking is only possible for those who have the time/space to think. People who are forced to frequent soup kitchens are usually too busy trying to stay alive that they haven't time to philosophise.
> The more difficult a theory is to understand, the closer it is supposed to be to the truth.
But aren't a lot of 'difficult' theories concerned with the non-existence of empirical "truth"?
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-10 02:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-10 03:00 pm (UTC)As to my preferences, I refer to 'The Homosexual'; 'Sissy' is the new 'Gay', don't you know.
W
Re: False philosophy
Date: 2004-10-10 03:10 pm (UTC)A theory concerned with the non-existence of empirical truth would *have* to be difficult as it would be a contradiction in terms...
Regarding time to think, it seems that in times of strife people usually turn back to what is real. In a life of food and luxury, the first thing to get ditched is the truth (in favour of personal pleasure, e.g., masturbation).
Re: soup kitchens
Date: 2004-10-10 03:19 pm (UTC)Re: False philosophy
Date: 2004-10-10 04:01 pm (UTC)listen to yourself. you're building a nice little myth around exactly the kind of binary hierarchies being discussed.
& truths aren't valid in every context, and so the word oughtn't be capitalized.
Derrida video
Date: 2004-10-10 05:15 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-10 05:24 pm (UTC)Anyway, thanks, this was useful. I've just started a gender MA and will be diving head first into post-structuralism, not an area I've been particular familiar with before. I do like this approach where everything is interrogated, nothing taken for granted, exhausting as it may well turn out to be.
Re: False philosophy
Date: 2004-10-10 06:28 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-10 08:52 pm (UTC)http://books.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,11617,1324460,00.html
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-10 10:57 pm (UTC)I'd forgotten that in 'Of Grammatology' Derrida 'connects the priority Rousseau gives to speech over writing with the priority he gives to nature over culture, to melody over harmony, and to coitus over masturbation.' Derrida then works to show how the suppressed terms are essential to the preferred ones. I believe he playfully refers to masturbation as 'the supplement to the copula'. Anyway, our Anonymous friend who dismisses D as 'intellectual masturbation' should take note.
Here's Liberation's front cover:
Their coverage seems much more emotional and poetic than The Guardian's. If Derrida is seen as a philosopher in the UK and US, in France he's seen as a poet and man of letters, his main themes friendship and 'the other'.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-10 11:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-10 11:22 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-10 11:48 pm (UTC)Foucault's writing is a model of impeccable clarity. He made a lot of sense and was easy to follow. He's just the wrong example of the kind of 'theorist' they're trying to evoke. Lacan, maybe...
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-11 12:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-11 07:49 am (UTC)Re: Day not opposite of night?
Date: 2004-10-11 03:43 pm (UTC)Sometimes it's tough to "boil things down" without oversimplifying a complex and wonderful reality. Simplicity is very attractive but the very attractive can sometimes be very stupid. Witness Jessica Simpson...though I wouldn't consider her "very attractive" so maybe my theory isn't as simple as I think it is.
Derrida, Philosophy and Lessons from France
Date: 2004-10-12 08:11 pm (UTC)http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4105659
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-13 03:24 pm (UTC)http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/community/postmodern.html
The Postmodernism Generator was written by Andrew C. Bulhak, using the Dada Engine, a system for generating random text from recursive grammars. The Postmodernism Generator generates meaningless--but grammatically correct and disturbingly plausible--academic-style texts filled with postmodern jargon.
Dr. Alan Sokal, professor of physics at NYU, submitted one such text as an actual essay.
W
Criticisms of deconstruction
Date: 2004-10-13 04:23 pm (UTC)