Hi Tim,
Thanks for coming over and having a look and raising a few questions!
First, I want to say that I regard all of the claims above as commonsense views. I treat commonsense views, not as the final word, but as the starting points for theory (just as sense perception and common sense are the starting points for science). Where we end up, in trying to resolve the puzzles that arise out of those assertions may be quite different (in both science and in our theory of interpretation).
Second, I should probably have inserted a hedge into those statements -- something that put aside until later, the possibility that an author might, in full awareness of our usual critical practice, try to frustrate that practice. Works of art which are themselves based upon post-modern theories must especially be put aside at the beginning, but we can't put them aside forever.
Along with avant garde art and theater of the absurd, I would include zen koans. Looking ahead to what I expect my final theory to say about them, I would interpret koans as attempts to "say the unsayable" -- to communicate a meaning or a state of mind which cannot be put into words by means of words -- words which frustrate our attempts to make sense of them. (I suspect that avant garde art is often attempting something similar -- and that it must still be regarded as a form of communication, though one which works by only appearing to have an intermediate meaning). On such an account, the koan ends up being "parasitic" on our ordinary attempts to make sense of the "overt meaning." If people always spoke in koans and we got used to this, we would not try to make sense of them anymore, and then the frustration required to convey the unsayable meaning would disappear and we could no longer communicate this unsayable meaning. The same goes for avant garde art (I suspect) and this gives rise to a paradox: what do you do when the avant garde becomes the norm?
It occurs to me that Derrida should be viewed as himself in the tradition of the koan -- attempting to frustrate our attempts to make sense of texts and of the world (just another text), perhaps for the sake of some unstatable form of enlightenment (or is the enlightenment simply a recognition of how our attempts to make rational sense must fail?). (I've been trying to learn about Derrida and the other post-modern thinkers, but let me admit that so far I have not actually read any of his texts directly.)
[This message has been edited by ChrisW (edited March 31, 2004).]
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