The Perpetual Wound

I just read Mark Fisher’s blog post on Jacques Derrida and deconstruction-ism – which inevitably led me to the recent Derrida debates circulating within the OOO niche. In light of those discussions, I want to weigh-in on a few things: First, I generally find Fisher’s blog K-PUNK a fantastic read. Mark is articulate and informed – and more interestingly, for me, he is often a cogent critic of the pathologies inherent in capitalist systems and culture. His most recent book, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009) is a short but allegedly scathing analysis of capitalist procedures and discourse. I have not read the book yet (it’s on my October reading list!), but from what I can tell it will be well worth the engagement.

Second, I agree with Mark’s argument that many claims made about Derrida (for example, about being too focused on texts, textuality and language) are criticisms of methodology, rather than suggestions that Derrida literally thinks reality is composed of texts. Make no mistake about it: Derrida, despite his brief forays into art and architecture, was mainly concerned with the interpretation and critique of textual artifacts. And most of Derrida’s own expressive efforts were focused on producing texts. But, I believe, any serious reading of Derrida’s later texts in particular would reveal that he is not claiming that the universe is only a multiplicity of texts, but that he finds it useful and necessary to focus on most cultural expressions as if they were texts. On the merit or illegitimacy of such an approach I’ll let the reader judge.

But where I don’t follow Fisher is when he implies that Derrida’s work was not philosophy:

“…much of what is interesting about Derrida comes from his interstitial position between literary theory and philosophy, the way that he drew philosophical implications from supposedly "literary" features of texts. I'm not saying that a philosophy couldn't be construed from elements of Derrida's work. But turning it into A Philosophy is already "to do violence" to it.”

I think it important to look a little closer. For me, Derrida’s work was so much ‘interstitial’ and transgressive that it seemingly exploded the false boundary between literature and philosophical works. So when someone says that Derrida was in the main a literary critic or theorist rather than a philosopher they seem to miss the point of his work completely. Derrida showed us that all writing is fundamentally an artifact of surface variations within one particular and historical mode of expression or communication. He also definitively demonstrated how what we take from any text will depend in large part on the subconscious conceptual systems we adopt, accumulate and inhabit, and how, if we are to move past the contingent and tentative nature of language and writing, we will need to develop the capacity for reflexive and creative interpretations of the social world.

The core potency of Derrida’s work for me, however, was his demonstration of how language and conceptual thinking are fundamentally indeterminate - with limits and potentials that could be pushed but not transcended. Derrida’s uncloaking of the limits of semantic reasoning through textual ‘deconstruction’ begged questions about human expressive artifacts more generally, and opened the door for more ‘playful’, ironic and reflexive understandings of “truth”, rationality and human speech-acts. At best, Derrida’s writings are a skillful means of prompting those of us of the literate persuasion to be less ridged and more creative with our own communications and claims to truth.

Many anthropologists say similar things when we argue that all discourses are stories: culturally emanated (contingent) narratives that vary over time and space and context, and which can alternatively reinforce attitudes, provide explanations, mark differences, educate, inspire, trigger emotions, deepen collective memories, and/or resonate hitherto unknown possibilities. These stories (cf. Bennett's term 'onto-story') also always contribute to how we perceive and understand the world. And so genres (i.e., philosophical writings, literary writings, pornographic writings), for the most part, are more cultural distinctions than actual distinct species of knowledge.

So we don’t need to “do violence” to Derrida’s work by turning it into something more manageable or systemic, because we need only let it be what it is: both a reminder and a method. It is a reminder for us to perpetually acknowledge the limits and inherent playfulness of language and conceptual thinking. And it is a method because the ‘deconstruction’ approach is capable of teasing apart any particular truth-claim or body of truth-claims, and helps us seek out the hidden semantic and connotative treasures (or lines of flight?) in textual expressions. Moreover, Deconstruction, broadly, fuses this general methodological approach to reading texts with an attitude of accepting the limits of language and conceptuality to provide a fresh perspective on the limits and capacities of human cognition.

I think much of the problem people have with Derrida is with just how much he flaunted the indeterminacy of language and conceptual reasoning. Many people I know who are otherwise great thinkers are very disturbed by the Derridian (and Wittgensteinan) notion that language only ever approximates reality, and that our utterances are at base art-full attempts at signifying realities that only ever have faint resemblance to the things we are referring to. In short, the seeming fact that language - and therefore thought - is always a limited and tentative artifice deeply disturbs and unsettles people who seek or seem to require a degree of personal security in the face of an ever-changing and ulterior world (this refers to what some psychologists call the human requirement for ‘ontological security’). It is as if the indeterminacy of truth and language has wounded them, making them vulnerable to the dark attraction of meaninglessness and nihilism - and by refusing Derrida’s insights and rejecting his work they can keep what they see as ‘irrationality’ or nihilism at bay. But Derrida, following Wittgenstein, was ever diligent in pointing out that efforts to hang on to some pristine vocabulary, favored schema or textual heritage is a fool’s errand.

Yet, following Derrida, I suggest that this bleeding unto nihilism need not be an execution. Derrida’s work, I maintain, affords us the opportunity to accept the indeterminate and contingent aspects of the world, while also freeing us to be more creative and playful in adapting our expressions and communications than we ever thought possible. My reading of Derrida’s work, paradoxically, suggests that it can produce a more reflexive attitude (change in cognition) towards language, truth and speech-acts in the reader, and therefore actually does more to free us from the limited affects of language and signification than we would normally suppose. For me, Derrida’s castration of textuality, language and semantic rationality nudges us to search elsewhere for meaning and value, and unwittingly points us towards more visceral and material (ecological) modes of apprehending the world. Freed from the tyranny of conceptual certainty we thus become more human than can be spoken of.

Therefore, to repeat, it is not at all fair to treat Derrida’s work as mere literary theory if only because he also had/has interesting things to say about human psychology, about human language, and about the nature of human meanings. Despite his literary interests, Derrida’s writings don’t just teach about texts they also teach us about the humans reading texts. And it is in this sense of gathering insights about living in the world that Derrida was a philosopher par excellence.