Paul,
Thank you for posting the link to this lucid and entertaining piece. My take on it is rather different from those above. I write as a recovering post-structuralist. I found myself disagreeing with many of your individual formulations, although I do not necessarily disagree with the general thrust of your piece. On the whole, my impression is that you have written a scholarly essay that lacks a scholarly apparatus, and as a result the essay does not present the evidence to support your strongly stated views. At times, I wonder if the evidence exists.
I provide below just a few examples of local disagreement (and I may be back to add more, if I can find the time):
In your opening paragraph, you claim that "the prestige of literature has declined as postmodern critical theories have percolated from the academy down to the general culture." Just as an aside, this formulation is interesting in that it relies on precisely the sort of binary opposition between the culture of the academy and “general culture” that deconstruction – and post-structuralism generally – treats with suspicion. But I think I disagree with the claim as stated. I do not believe that the prestige of literature has been affected one way or another by what has happened in the academy. I think there has been a decline in the prestige of literary criticism, but that decline was preceded by an extraordinary rise in the academic prestige – and power – of literary critics, as criticism came in the 1970s and 80s to displace philosophy at the heart of humanities. In any case, I think it is very hard to gauge how things like “postmodern critical theories” are received in “general culture.”
At the end of your first paragraph you describe the disdain with which “postmodern critics” treat “traditional poets and storytellers.” This is plainly untrue of many of the leading practitioners of deconstruction, including Derrida and Paul de Man, both of whom (last I checked) write almost exclusively about canonical writers, and Romantic poetry was one of the first academic territories to be staked out and dominated by deconstructionist criticism. I have heard Derrida proclaim that the reason he comments on the works he comments on (in this case it was texts by Aquinas) is because he loves these works and considers them the most interesting, intelligent and sophisticated texts he knows. That does not mean that the texts (or their authors) are not subjected to withering critique, but the point is that the texts are worthy of critique – unlike most of the crap that gets written.
There are certainly people in English departments who proclaim that the unknown diaries of peasant women are just as worthy of study and critique as the “masterworks” of Kant or Spinoza (or Emerson or Hawthorne, for that matter). But those people are not necessarily deconstructionists or post-modern critics. It seems to me that the movement towards “popular culture” studies in the humanities derives largely from huge successes in the fields of sociology and social history (especially the extraordinary influence of the French Annales school on the American academy), which predate post-structuralism and are hostile to it.
Swift’s Lagodan scheme seems to me to have nothing to do with deconstruction, which denies any necessary connection between words and things. Rather, Swift seems to me to be playing on the logician’s enterprise, and there I have to say, for all his cleverness, Swift’s position is rather anti-intellectual. I do not and cannot do it myself, but there are people who can and do map out language in terms of logical symbols. They are not post-modern thinkers. Quite the reverse. They believe that meaning can be fixed.
Finally (for now, at least), I think you fundamentally misunderstand Derrida’s famous dictum, “il n’y a pas de hors-texte.” You translate the phrase (on page 4 of my printout) as meaning that there is “nothing outside the text,” but I think a better translation is that there is no outside-the-text. In other words, I take Derrida to mean (and I take this to be a fundamental principle of deconstruction) that our world must be conceived of as a text and that we must be cognizant of the fact that our giving names to things (through a system of recognized distinctions – binary oppositions) inevitably shapes that world or, what for Derrida is the same thing, our understanding of that world. The point is not that texts exist and things do not. Rather, the point is that things cannot be divorced from the way we speak and think of them. Logocentrism is a problem for deconstruction, but it is not a problem easily avoided.
Oh, and one more point. You imply that structuralists agree with Derrida that “differance” forever frustrates communication. That seems wrong to me. Structuralism is a theory of how communication is effectuated through a system of recognized differences. The differences are arbitrary and have no connection to their referents, but communication is possible based on the differences within the system. Derrida broke with the structuralists by stressing the “play” in the relationship between the binary opposites and, more politically, by contending that binary oppositions are always hierarchical in nature.
Sorry for being so long-winded (and I only got up to page 5!), and thanks for the stimulating read!!
epigone
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