Derrida, De Man, Fish and Deconstruction

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Jacques Derrida, the father of the movement, based partially based his thought on his understanding of Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. Derrida announced that "A text remains…forever imperceptible." In the same passage of "Plato’s Pharmacy", the French philosopher insists that "reading and writing are one." When we write something we convey unintended meanings mand do not really say what we intend. Derrida argues that writing came before speech, and his most famous statement was that "there is nothing outside the text." Using similar logic, he argued that there was no thought before language. For him, words refer nothing other than other words. Words do not refer to anything beyond language. Because of the imperfect nature of language, a person can only have a fragmentary view of self and cannot even be alienated in the way Marxists claim. Derrida was trained as a philosopher, and this approach to literary criticism was meant to be much more. It was to be an new epistemology , the impact of which was expected by many to rival that of Immanuel Kant’s so-called "Copernican Revolution" in thought. Given the extreme instability of meanings, it is difficult to see how this approach permits the construction of an epistemology. It leaves no room for belief in the continuity of history.

American linguist Stanley Fish argues that real meaning does not exist and it is inevitable that people will misunderstand texts. People only think linguistically; therefore, nothing can exist for us outside of language. The lounge chair in one’s living room only exists because it is different from the CD player, the bookcase, and the fireplace. It exists because it is different from other things that are described by words. However, there is no lounge chair beyond language nor can one be imagined beyond the structure of language. Everything depends upon the structures of language. After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center, he raised some hackles by suggesting that there was no universal standard for evil or defining a terrorist. Some respondents wondered whether Hitler, Pol Pot, Jim Jones , timothy McVeigh or Osama bin Laden could be viewed as anything other than major evil-doers. Fish also called for careful reflection on what drove the "terrorists" to such murderous action, even though there was very little inclination then to consider the legitimate complaints of the Islamic fundamentalists.

Derrida noted that meaning can only exist temporarily within the framework of words. For this reason, he insisted that there can be no original signifier like God, Reason, or History. As for human beings, there is a difference between the self and what the self thinks about itself. Only the latter can be known because it exists in words. Thee existence of the former, the self, does not exist as a verifiable, objective reality. For that reason, theology and metaphysics no longer have foundations. By the same token, he disparages all political philosophies and outlooks because they are built upon illusory metaphysics of spirit, that posits some higher or ultimate authority, be it God or reason. Suggesting that all politics is some sort of muddle, the deconstructionists leave us with no useful tool in battling racism, economic exploitation, sexism, or any number of other evils. Deconstructionist thought also fells all metanarratives with no regrets because it believed that they invariably restrict freedom and individuality. By denying the value of "totalizing narratives" they unleash fluidity, free expression, and subjectivity. Of course, deconstruction, built on flimsy linguistic insights, has become itself a "totalizing narrative." In history and the social sciences, deconstructionist criticism most frequently focusses on ideas focussed around the concept of democracy. All to often, they rightly note, scholars have exaggerated the extent of democracy in American society. John Adams, the second president, was probably right when he suggested that true democracy will probably never exist. Yet, far more democracy exists in 2002 than did in Adams day, and many more Americans aspire to create a democratic society.

The deconstructionist critique of knowledge has reduced the value of education. It is impossible not to wonder how professors who accept decconstructive postmodernism can take education very seriously. Jean-Francois Lyotard acknowledges the decline in education’s stature and diminished legitimacy of knowledge. He attributed these developments to the failure of modernity and education’s continuing attachment to that mode of thought.
Noam Chomsky, a professor of linguistics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was the most persuasive defender of philosophical rationalism, which is antithetical to deconstructionism. He argued that linguistic ability was built into the structure of the human mind and was innate, not grounded entirely in culture. The mind, he maintained, existed separately from what people said and did. There was also a link between the mind and the outside world about which it formulates thoughts and words. The opposite premises are more congenial to deconstructionism. Chomsky dismissed deconstructionism as incomprehensible, noting that its advocates cannot describe it with sufficient clarity to communicate with others about it.

Critics of deconstruction "have accused deconstruction of subverting objective standards of literary explication and evaluation, of blurring the distinction between criticism and imaginative literature…and of engaging in a generally self-indulgent, irresponsible style of writing that undercuts the scholarly and educational aims of academic discourse." Other than retorting that there are no objective standards, the deconstructionists have done little to answer these charges. Their worldview is a self-protective one, geared to avoiding domination by ideas, institutions, or those who claim authority. In the process they abandon any search for truth and or exploration of the pïwers of human beings, other than pleasure seeking.
Belgian-born Paul de Man, a professor of comparative literature, played the most important role in bringing Derrida’s deconstructionist views to the United States. Americans found deconstruction a powerful device for liberating themselves from a great deal of received wisdom, but their admiration for the Belgian diminished somewhat in they learned in the late 1980s that that he had written for Nazi publications. Americans learned from Derrida that words and texts do not describe the world; they refer only to themselves. they are self-referential. They questioned the value of all sources of knowledge and decided that since philosophical metaphysics and ethics no longer exist, it is also impossible for history to exist. For them, everything was interpretation and there was no way to find one interpretation any better than another.

De Man, whose work strongly underpins American postmodernism, wrote favorably about Nazism and even voiced anti-Semitic sentiments when he was a Belgian journalist. Fritz Stern has suggested that Nazism grew in an atmosphere of "cultural despair." This term accurately reflects much of Heidegger's thought as well as much of today's postmodern thought. De Man came to the United States, passed himself off as a refugee from the Nazis, taught at Yale and was appointed a member of the Harvard Society of Fellows. He recruited many to Derrida's view that it is impossible to find meaning in written language. Everything, Derrida and De Man taught, was nothing more than interpretation. Since texts lacked stable meaning, everything in the literary word was a game and in chaos. No two readers understood the same paragraph to mean the same thing. Nietzsche said everything was interpretation, but he did not mean this. The deconstructionism of Derrida and De Man appealed to many because it offered a tool for dismantling traditional and conservative systems of thought. It was an even more potent wrecking tool in the hands of fascists and their kin to use against liberal ethics, leftist philosophy, and social justice thought in general. All of them rest upon the twin views that truth is accessible and that justice is definable. At his 1984 memorial service, De Man was defined as that rare authentic person: "In a profession full of fakeness, he was r%al." His Nazi past was unearthed soon thereafter as well as the fact that e had abandoned his wife and three sons, had stiffed many creditors, and had probably been involved in fraudulent business dealings.
Michele Foucault, a French philosopher, who considered himself an "archaeologist of knowledge," may have been the famous intellectual in the world at the time of his death in 1984. His work would become the most important part of the postmodernist canon. His work was to underpin the New Criticism approach to literature and epistemology, which superceded and absorbed deconstruction. The historian Paul Veyne said Foucault was "the most important event in the thought of our century. He has been portrayed as the representative man of the Twentieth Century; that is most unlikely, but he was in some ways the representative postmodern intellectual. Some saw in his experiments with gay sadomasochistic sex that inspired in him unusual courage and ethical adventurousness. Many learned from him that mere tolerance was a sign of a reactionary viewpoint since it simply meant that someone was putting up with deviations from conventional morality. His views about sexual gratification endorsed the notion that sexual emancipation would somehow help bring an end to capitalism and hasten the creation of an utopia. Praise of the "will to gratification" had been a key element of the counterculture of the 1960s. His political ideas seemed to run the gamut of anti-establishment causes. He thought Stalin’s USSR was preferable to Truman’s USA and was an enthusiastic supporter of Ayatollah Khomeini. Noam Chomsky, an American radical, thought Foucault’s concelt of justice was "throwing open every prison and shutting down every court."