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Chapter4 Post-structuralism, Decon struction, Post-Modernism

Chapter4 Post-structuralism, Deconstruction, Post-Modernism

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Chapter4Post-structuralism, Deconstruction, Post-Modernism

There have always been two traditions in philosophy.

One asserts that there are truths that are universal and eternal.

The other school claims that the word is physical and historical and that any truth we arrive at about it is equally historical, equally located within physical universe.

The second is closer to science than to religion, and it promotes the ideal of progressive change.

Disputes between these two positions occasionally break out, and one such war erupted after 1967, when a French philosopher named Jacques Derrida strongly reasserted the claims of the second position in three books-Writing and Difference, of Grammatology, and Speech and Phenomenon, all published in 1967.

He argued that the most recent attempt to assert the first or absolutist and foundationalist position in the work of Edmund Husserl was mistaken .

Husserl argued that all truth was like geometry: one could in one’s mind picture an ideal triangle.

To understand that, you have to think about how your own mind works.Your mind possesses an ability to abstract.Before you is a society you might be inclined to think of as something of a slave society.People do nothing but work most of the time, and most of the work produces value and wealth for a very small sliver of the population-investors, large property-owners, corporate executives, etc. – who reap the benefits of others’ labors.

All societies are pyramids.

But still, there are all these sticky and contentious differences between places and people, or between moments in time.

If you choose the universalist position, you lose the differentiated detail; if you go for the differentiated detail, you lose sight of your perfect abstraction.

Husserl thought he had solved this problem.

He argued that you can start with your consciousness of the world – which is called phenomenology because it deals with phenomena or things that appear as images in your conscious mind,

But , according to Husserl, if you use your powers of abstraction to transcend or step outside that flow of experience, you attain a transcendental realm of cognition where the thing you wish to grasp with your mind exists in a purely ideal form purged of all connection to the world.

He argued that the transcendental place outside time and space where universal knowledge seemed possible is itself merely one more place among other places and one more moment of consciousness that is shadowed by other moments.You can never get outside time and space. There is no transcendence.

Essentially, Derrida inverted Husserl.

If Husserl claimed the flow can always be converted into an absolutely ideal truth, one that exists in a pure mental space, Derrida said that all absolute truths and all supposedly pure mental states are merely part of the flow.

Derrida’s most interesting intellectual move was to suggest that difference characterized not only language but also all reality, from our thought processes to the world itself.

Derrida found many instances of thinkers who either were aware of the way difference undermined identity or were committed to a suppression of difference in order to lay claim to absolute truth.

He contends that metaphysics usually consists of the ideal world, to be axiomatic.

One of the more interesting ways of mapping philosophy that Derrida encountered in his investigations concerned the opposition of speech and writing, or of mind and the external techniques of graphic representation upon which knowledge depends.

He borrows it as a term for the way difference in time and space breaks up identity and presence.

The prejudice against graphic representation turns up in many places in western culture and especially in literature.

A graphic representation such as writing is also conventional: it depends on agreements that allow images to mean certain things.

A school of literary criticism called deconstructionism sprang up in America as a result of Derrida’s influence.

Critics such as Paul de Man argued that literary texts are inherently incoherent.

The two most noteworthy practitioners of deconstructive feminism were Helene Cixous and Luce Irigaray.

Irigaray argues, in Speculum of the Other Woman and This Sex Which is not one, that in western philosophy woman have been portrayed as matter, body, fluidity, boundarylessness, irrationality, artificiality, and the like.Women are the opposite or mirror image of men, who are assigned reason, truth, authority, and authenticity.

Male philosophic speculation abstracts from concrete particularity and bodily materiality when it resorts to metaphysical concepts and categories such as being universality, truth, and infinity.

Derrida’s work helped inspire a movement called post-structuralism which sought to learn from Saussure and the other structuralists while moving beyond them to other concerns such as social power.

The Post-Modern Condition and The Differend. Lyotard argues that knowledge and discourse are inseparable.Jean Baudrillard, began as a structuralist sociologist interested in the way the semiotic regimes of advertising shape and categorize reality.Preoccupied with the power of cultural representations to become lived reality.

Metaphysics claims that difference arises from identity, but in fact difference generates identity.Another deconstructive move would be to examine texts for ideals of truth that seem aloof from representation or signification.The task of deconstruction is to undo such hierarchies and to show that all truth is differential and physical.

What metaphysics imagines is ideality is in fact merely an effect of signification, something physical and historical, rather than metaphysical and eternal.

Exercise 4.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(1)

King Lear enacts a philosophic tragedy as much as a personal one.

The play argues for a notion of identity as internal essence.

Exercise 4.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(2)

Derrida would consider the crisis of representation in the play, which allows truth to be denied, falseness to be taken for truth, and signification to triumph over meaning, to be a crisis of western rationalism or logocentrism.

Exercise 4.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(3)

Like logocentrism, the play portrays truth as interior to the mind or logos; it stands outside signification and can do without its external assistance.

Signification is an addition to truth, a substitute whose power of imitation, substitution, and repetition represents the danger that signification might do without truth or meaning altogether, take its place, and kill it off.

Exercise 4.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(4)

She and others describe her relation to signification as one of appropriate delay or deferment: truth is always describe in this way in the logocentric tradition, as an essence outside signification that could exist on its own and that only secondarily and accidentally enters signification, which is characterized as a realm of empty markers devoid of life or of any essential connection to meaning.

Exercise 4.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(5)

That the play reproduces certain western prejudices regarding truth and representation as well as speech and writing is borne out in subsequent scenes in which letters play an important role in helping to undermine truth and paternal authority.

The treachery of the servant and treachery of writing intersect most forcefully in Oswald’s handing over to Goneril of Regan’s letter to Edmund.

Exercise 4.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(6)

At stake in the play is not merely a debate between modes of signification but rather the idea that there is such a thing as a transcendental signified, a truth or meaning that stands outside signification in an ideal ideational realm.

Edmund is the arch-contriver in the play, and it is important that he is the one least convinced of the ideal of the transcendental signified.

Exercise 4.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(7)

Without a transcendental signified, which guarantees a differentiation between ideal and material, spirit and matter, truth and sign, inside and outside, all the orders of law that kept things apart in discrete identities and hierarchical oppositions between the virtuous and the nonvirtuous, everything becomes mixed.

Exercise 4.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(8)

Edgar restores not only the state but also the proper order of truth and signification as western metaphysics conceives it.

According to the play’s metaphysics, internal essences like virtue are identities that then give rise to differences.

Exercise 4.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(9)

Yet strive as it will to expel the qualities of signification and writing from truth and speech, the play nevertheless suggests that its ideals are essentially and originally contaminated and compromised by what they seek to expel.The most important distinction in the play is the one that places convention, the conventions especially that make the marks of writing capable of signifying, outside truth.

Exercise 4.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(10)

Lear himself discovers this internal fissure and danger- that power, authority, and truth might be conventions, mere repetitions of codes, rather than essences whose expression compels recognition- in his encounters with Goneril and Regan, encounters which provoke him to lose his sense of an internal identity.

Exercise 4.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(11)

The ideal of the direct expression of truth conceived as an internal essence of the mind is realized most forcefully in Lear’s performatives, his curses and commands particularly.Edmund is portrayed negatively for having contracted with both Regan and Goneril, while others, Edgar especially, act in accordance with more virtuous inner motives that stand aloof from the play of articulation and signification in such contracting.

Exercise 4.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(12)

In order for feeling to be spoken, signification must be at work, and if signification is at work, so is convention, an ought or a set of rules that govern the expression of content in form, of meaning in signification.I cannot conceive you, kent says to Gloucester, when Gloucester cannot tell the difference between his two sons.

Exercise 4.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(13)

The original and foundational values of the play, therefore, such as truth and virtue, are the effects and the products of a fashioning fit, a forming according to a model or a convention.

The play is a reflection on what it means to allow someone like Edmund to rise above his proper place in society, but linked to that is the problem of what it means to allow language to have other functions than to convey true ideas.

Exercise 4.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(14)

Edgar is the character most charged with curing the madness brought about by the overturning of the right order of truth and signification.Truth should precede and determine signification in language, but in the play that relation is inverted.Edgar is associated with a spiritualist ideal of absolute truth.

Exercise 4.1 William Shakespeare, King Lear(15)

The ideal of restored absolute power in a social and political sense depends on the elimination of those associated with signs, rhetoric, and the inversion of the proper relation between truth and signification.

It is such moments that a deconstructive reading would focus on. They show that convention, signification, and difference are more essential to metaphysical ideals of truth than metaphysics cares to let on.

Exercise 4.2Elizabeth Bishop, Over 2000 Illustrations and a Co

mplete Concordance (1)About an illustrated Bible which contains modern photographs of Middle Eastern scenes.

The Bible, as a story about God and humanity, contends that the real world is actually just a metaphor or symbol whose meaning is spiritual. Behind the physical universe is a spiritual one. The literal physical world itself is just an illusion, or even an illustrstion.

Exercise 4.2Elizabeth Bishop, Over 2000 Illustrations and a Co

mplete Concordance (2)She notes that the images of the Seven Wonders in the illustrated Bible are a touch familiar.Note too that the idea of a spiritual world depends still on something physical-being engraved.They are contingent and historical, rather than eternal and extrs-worldly.Her tone is mocking at times.

Exercise 4.2Elizabeth Bishop, Over 2000 Illustrations and a Co

mplete Concordance (3)Crusaders did of course literally return to the Middle East to convert it from an Arab homeland into a Holy Land. Think about how there are two kinds of imperialism at work there.She turns to a description of the actual physical world.She suggests that time has eroded something.

Exercise 4.2Elizabeth Bishop, Over 2000 Illustrations and a Co

mplete Concordance (4)Writing, according to Derrida, is a form of representation from which spiritual meaning would seem to be absent because it is not living, not the voice of consciousness, and more images of writing immediately follow in the poem.

Her encounter with the literal lines of the letters also gives rise to imagery usually associated with mystical encounters, with spirituality.

Exercise 4.2Elizabeth Bishop, Over 2000 Illustrations and a Co

mplete Concordance (5)The second stanza is so completely different from the first that you wonder if you have not in that final image of the first stanza passed through a doorway of some kind.

Exercise 4.2Elizabeth Bishop, Over 2000 Illustrations and a Co

mplete Concordance (6)The first line of the third stanza is in keeping with the second philosophic position described above, the one that emphasizes the endless sophic position described above, the one that emphasizes the endless flow of experience and life through space and time, a flow that never can be converted into a transcendental meaning or truth that stands outside the flow.

Exercise 4.2Elizabeth Bishop, Over 2000 Illustrations and a Co

mplete Concordance (7)It would also be a world that could not be considered to be an illustration of a spirit world that stands behind it or of a transcendental truth.

Exercise 4.3Alice Munro, Differently(1)

It helps to bear in mind that foundationalist sounds like fundamentalist.

But are they like fundamentalists in believing that women should honor traditional female roles in society?

The men occupy center stage, and in the end it is Edgar and Albany who manage the allocation of power and blame. Cordelia, no longer needed, dies.

Exercise 4.3Alice Munro, Differently(2)

The difference between the absolutist position and the deconstructive one is often calibrated as a difference between men and women.

Women writers are sometimes quite good at mocking the absolutist position and at drawing attention to its shortcomings.

Virginia Woolf, for example, has great fun picking on male philosophers in To the Lighthouse.

Exercise 4.3Alice Munro, Differently(3)

To Woolf, that detail seems more true than their complete dictionary, even if it is the kind of knowledge that does not fit in a dictionary.Another woman writer who likes to mock male pretensions is Alice Munro.Differently is something of a love story between women, although its plot concerns a sexual affair between Georgia, the central female figure, and a man named Miles. Miles also sleeps with Georgia’s best friend, Maya, and that ruins their friendship.

Exercise 4.3Alice Munro, Differently(4)

We never behave as if we believed we were going to die, Georgia remarks to Raymond, Maya’s husband. How should we behave? He asks. Differently, she answers.If truth were available for knowing in the way that both foundationalists and fundamentalists believe is possible, such regret would not be possible

Exercise 4.3Alice Munro, Differently(5)

But this is a story by a woman, and that sense of absoluteness that in the past so assisted men in managing their world with such authority and certainty is missing.

We instead as readers find ourselves in a world of missed chances, missteps, problematic motives for action, and complex feelings of anger and obligation toward others.

Exercise 4.3Alice Munro, Differently(6)

It is more differential or relational than absolute and certain.

The story begins with what seems like a contrast between the two contending philosophic positions.

How we identify thing is crucial for how we know the world and for what the meaning of things in the world is.

Exercise 4.3Alice Munro, Differently(7)

Why point out that things can be identified in different ways?

Joyce’s stories are quite acerbically realist; no fairy tales at all.

A story within a story now begins, and we hear more about Maya. She is described as gifted and brittle and the most vulnerable person of all.

Exercise 4.3Alice Munro, Differently(8)

From a foundationalist perspective, there is only one truth to reality, not multiple truths.

We learn that Maya and Harvey are having an affair that she characterizes, humorously, as exercise.

We are clearly in a world of fuzzy moral lines here.

Georgia’s life in the bookstore evokes the possibility of absolute knowledge.

Exercise 4.3Alice Munro, Differently(9)

Instead, Georgia sees plausible promises, and notice that the first book she mentions is in praise of folly.It might be fun to compare her humorous conception of madness or folly and his tragic one.Ho does it change power relations between them? How is this a comment on men and marriage in general?What does it mean to say that her marriage seemed a world of ceremony, of safety, of gestures, concealment?

Exercise 4.3Alice Munro, Differently(10)

The narrator begins the final section of the story with what might appear to be a conundrum.

Given how the story is about missteps and mistakes, about not seeing clearly and yet acting on the basis of unclear knowledge, how does Maya’s vision in the end offer a kind of protective security against the contingency.