Deconstructing Fish
Warning! What follows is about literary criticism and thus of no interest to the vast majority of people everywhere who have anything resembling a life and an instinctual understanding that spending your time on purely intellectual meditations are basically a vain and self-indulgent effort. But be that as it may, I can still get my disingenuous ire up about this shit. . .
I read this column last night and was kind of perplexed and amused by it. The esteemed Stanley Fish's appears to criticize deconstruction's use by American literary theorists as a political tool because of the inability for deconstruction to develop any stable position to work from, as it is, by its very nature, always undermining all positions, reducing every theory, every assertion, down to the point of incomprehensibility. Essentially, he is saying two things, 1) that deconstruction was never really dangerous because when it comes down to it is useless form of interrogation as it posits that everything is made up of that same language stuff - that is, if everything is a social construct then what does it mean to criticize something as a social construct? He writes:
[Deconstruction] discovers, as it always will, that its surface coherence is achieved by the suppression of questions it must not ask if it is to maintain the fiction of its self-identity, the result is not the discovery of an anomaly, of a deviance from a norm that can be banished or corrected; for no structure built by man (which means no structure) could be otherwise.
and 2) that, the "reckless" use of deconstruction my American theorists did make it dangerous by using it as the basis for political criticism and thus stoking the fires of the "culture wars." He writes:
[D]econstruction [can be used] as a justification for reform or as the cause of evil; but the relationship between what is either celebrated or deplored will be rhetorical, not logical. That is, deconstruction cannot possibly be made either the generator of a politics you like or the cause of a politics you abhor. It just can’t be done without betraying it.
Now, I cannot argue with the limited use of infinite reductionism, and that taken to its natural end, this theory unravels everything into something that cannot be easily understood, if understood at all. Even as I write this I am troubled by my use of the word "natural" for example, and the words "use" and "infinite" do make me kind of itchy. It would be no great thing to start writing about those words in a futile attempt to fix them and better explain myself, but I'd digress further and further from my point, until that explanation becomes an impossibility. At the same time the talk of "betraying" deconstruction baffles me, because deconstruction is not an oath or a promise or a relationship. It is a form of interrogation that does undermine itself, and its proponents should be comfortable with that - or perhaps, if not "comfortable" then satisfactorily discomforted.
To say that deconstruction is not political and then bemoan that the "drama" of its role in the so-called "culture wars" and how it has led to "Careers made and ruined, departments torn apart, writing programs turned into sensitivity seminars, political witch hunts, public opprobrium, ignorant media attacks" is either disingenuous or short-sighted.
As one of the commenters on this article wrote (among a myriad of knee-jerk reactions against whatever understanding of deconstruction people already have and were happy to make Fish's comments into whatever they needed to be to reinforce their opinion), the idea that our understanding of "reality" is socially constructed and that all the aspects and categories we use to define it are also socially-constructed is inherently political, because it calls into question our assumptions regarding those institutions, attitudes and ideas that we deem as unjust or particularly absurd. (But what is "unjust" and who is this "we" and how can something be "particularly absurd" in an absurd universe?) Just as it calls into question those we consider "just" or "perfectly rational"? (and rightly so) Perhaps my point of view is the "American" kind that Fish is criticizing via his reading of the book by Cusset, but I don't see deconstruction as an end, so much as a beginning. I guess I am influenced by Trin Minh-Ha's work to reconstruct, as I said in a presentation about her for my Feminist Literary Theory class last semester: "It is as if she takes deconstruction as the default state of things, a point of nearly infinite possibilities from which she reassembles theories and ideas." However, it is not as if Trin defines herself as a "deconstructionist" (a label that is as problematic as any other), instead she is interested in the contexts within we we construct various models of identity and meaning.
Yes, you can argue that such a 'reconstruction' could be used to justify "abhorrent" politics, but that is the danger of all potential political models whether you see them as models of implicit empirical reality or constructed frame that we use to look at a certain place and time and attitude. Hell, I have been told more than once that my own politics are "abhorrent" because I call into question the assumptions of the virtue of profit, private property and voting. In a way Fish is guilty of the same thing he accuses "political deconstruction" of being guilty of because he writes that their use of deconstruction as a "critical interrogation" would only be helpful "if waiting around the next corner of analysis was a position that was genuinely inclusive," but he is making the assumption that there should have to be position that is inclusive. He is using deconstruction to deconstruct deconstruction? Isn't that circular and reductive? Yes it is, and yet he is still finding it useful to his rhetoric, because it is! I am almost convinced that he is winking at us as he writes this thing.
The problem here is the problem of "ends" - or rather, thinking there is one, could be one, should be one. . . When really we should be discussing "process" not ends. I have quoted Linda S. Kaufmann a few times here in the last year, and even made the sub-title of blog a variation of her conclusion from her essay "The Long Goodbye": "I want continually to cast doubt on the status of knowledge - even as [I am] in the process of constructing it." It seems to me that Mr. Fish wants to be able to insure that his prestigious titles and degrees continue to make him an authority and give him some means so say something about anything with finality. And the fact is he is doing it constantly with or without degrees, and so am I, and so are you reading this. My point is to not be afraid to contradict yourself, to lay flat your own assumptions, if his criticism of "American Academics". . .
(which is a term for a group of people that hold such a myriad of thoughts and ideas on critical theory that I am again boggled by the ability to even use it and have it mean anything - wanna quote Judith Butler? Go ahead, but to equate her words with "American academics"? No wonder people want to deconstruct everything - not to mention that he appears to use "French theory" as synonomus with "deconstruction" as if the latter were the entirety of the former)
. . .that use deconstruction to their own ends, is that they never turn that lens upon themselves then I have two responses to that, 1) It is a valid criticism, and 2) But all "American academics" don't not do that. I cannot speak with any authority as to the numbers and examples of theorists willing to turn that eyes on themselves and their own positions, but I know they exist, if only because I exist, and my own ideas are anything but original. They are not born spontaneously of the ether. The "trick", Mr. Fish, is in trying to always keep in mind that slipperiness of language and its simultaneous ability both exclude and be overly inclusive, flattening everything into some simple model that is supposed to be the end we reach, and if sometimes in the process of exploring a text I want to write something like "(de/re)constructing" because I feel it better expresses with our blunt-edged collection of arbitrary words a simultaneity of multiplicitous meaning and those meanings that also seek to negate them, what is so wrong with that?
I don't have answers. I don't want answers, because answers are misleading. Instead, I want a series of questions that we can stop any time along the way and examine in a context to the best of our ability and then move on as that momentary construction falls apart under the weight of the questions piling up behind it waiting to go on building and destroying as it moves towards nothing. . .
I read this column last night and was kind of perplexed and amused by it. The esteemed Stanley Fish's appears to criticize deconstruction's use by American literary theorists as a political tool because of the inability for deconstruction to develop any stable position to work from, as it is, by its very nature, always undermining all positions, reducing every theory, every assertion, down to the point of incomprehensibility. Essentially, he is saying two things, 1) that deconstruction was never really dangerous because when it comes down to it is useless form of interrogation as it posits that everything is made up of that same language stuff - that is, if everything is a social construct then what does it mean to criticize something as a social construct? He writes:
[Deconstruction] discovers, as it always will, that its surface coherence is achieved by the suppression of questions it must not ask if it is to maintain the fiction of its self-identity, the result is not the discovery of an anomaly, of a deviance from a norm that can be banished or corrected; for no structure built by man (which means no structure) could be otherwise.
and 2) that, the "reckless" use of deconstruction my American theorists did make it dangerous by using it as the basis for political criticism and thus stoking the fires of the "culture wars." He writes:
[D]econstruction [can be used] as a justification for reform or as the cause of evil; but the relationship between what is either celebrated or deplored will be rhetorical, not logical. That is, deconstruction cannot possibly be made either the generator of a politics you like or the cause of a politics you abhor. It just can’t be done without betraying it.
Now, I cannot argue with the limited use of infinite reductionism, and that taken to its natural end, this theory unravels everything into something that cannot be easily understood, if understood at all. Even as I write this I am troubled by my use of the word "natural" for example, and the words "use" and "infinite" do make me kind of itchy. It would be no great thing to start writing about those words in a futile attempt to fix them and better explain myself, but I'd digress further and further from my point, until that explanation becomes an impossibility. At the same time the talk of "betraying" deconstruction baffles me, because deconstruction is not an oath or a promise or a relationship. It is a form of interrogation that does undermine itself, and its proponents should be comfortable with that - or perhaps, if not "comfortable" then satisfactorily discomforted.
To say that deconstruction is not political and then bemoan that the "drama" of its role in the so-called "culture wars" and how it has led to "Careers made and ruined, departments torn apart, writing programs turned into sensitivity seminars, political witch hunts, public opprobrium, ignorant media attacks" is either disingenuous or short-sighted.
As one of the commenters on this article wrote (among a myriad of knee-jerk reactions against whatever understanding of deconstruction people already have and were happy to make Fish's comments into whatever they needed to be to reinforce their opinion), the idea that our understanding of "reality" is socially constructed and that all the aspects and categories we use to define it are also socially-constructed is inherently political, because it calls into question our assumptions regarding those institutions, attitudes and ideas that we deem as unjust or particularly absurd. (But what is "unjust" and who is this "we" and how can something be "particularly absurd" in an absurd universe?) Just as it calls into question those we consider "just" or "perfectly rational"? (and rightly so) Perhaps my point of view is the "American" kind that Fish is criticizing via his reading of the book by Cusset, but I don't see deconstruction as an end, so much as a beginning. I guess I am influenced by Trin Minh-Ha's work to reconstruct, as I said in a presentation about her for my Feminist Literary Theory class last semester: "It is as if she takes deconstruction as the default state of things, a point of nearly infinite possibilities from which she reassembles theories and ideas." However, it is not as if Trin defines herself as a "deconstructionist" (a label that is as problematic as any other), instead she is interested in the contexts within we we construct various models of identity and meaning.
Yes, you can argue that such a 'reconstruction' could be used to justify "abhorrent" politics, but that is the danger of all potential political models whether you see them as models of implicit empirical reality or constructed frame that we use to look at a certain place and time and attitude. Hell, I have been told more than once that my own politics are "abhorrent" because I call into question the assumptions of the virtue of profit, private property and voting. In a way Fish is guilty of the same thing he accuses "political deconstruction" of being guilty of because he writes that their use of deconstruction as a "critical interrogation" would only be helpful "if waiting around the next corner of analysis was a position that was genuinely inclusive," but he is making the assumption that there should have to be position that is inclusive. He is using deconstruction to deconstruct deconstruction? Isn't that circular and reductive? Yes it is, and yet he is still finding it useful to his rhetoric, because it is! I am almost convinced that he is winking at us as he writes this thing.
The problem here is the problem of "ends" - or rather, thinking there is one, could be one, should be one. . . When really we should be discussing "process" not ends. I have quoted Linda S. Kaufmann a few times here in the last year, and even made the sub-title of blog a variation of her conclusion from her essay "The Long Goodbye": "I want continually to cast doubt on the status of knowledge - even as [I am] in the process of constructing it." It seems to me that Mr. Fish wants to be able to insure that his prestigious titles and degrees continue to make him an authority and give him some means so say something about anything with finality. And the fact is he is doing it constantly with or without degrees, and so am I, and so are you reading this. My point is to not be afraid to contradict yourself, to lay flat your own assumptions, if his criticism of "American Academics". . .
(which is a term for a group of people that hold such a myriad of thoughts and ideas on critical theory that I am again boggled by the ability to even use it and have it mean anything - wanna quote Judith Butler? Go ahead, but to equate her words with "American academics"? No wonder people want to deconstruct everything - not to mention that he appears to use "French theory" as synonomus with "deconstruction" as if the latter were the entirety of the former)
. . .that use deconstruction to their own ends, is that they never turn that lens upon themselves then I have two responses to that, 1) It is a valid criticism, and 2) But all "American academics" don't not do that. I cannot speak with any authority as to the numbers and examples of theorists willing to turn that eyes on themselves and their own positions, but I know they exist, if only because I exist, and my own ideas are anything but original. They are not born spontaneously of the ether. The "trick", Mr. Fish, is in trying to always keep in mind that slipperiness of language and its simultaneous ability both exclude and be overly inclusive, flattening everything into some simple model that is supposed to be the end we reach, and if sometimes in the process of exploring a text I want to write something like "(de/re)constructing" because I feel it better expresses with our blunt-edged collection of arbitrary words a simultaneity of multiplicitous meaning and those meanings that also seek to negate them, what is so wrong with that?
I don't have answers. I don't want answers, because answers are misleading. Instead, I want a series of questions that we can stop any time along the way and examine in a context to the best of our ability and then move on as that momentary construction falls apart under the weight of the questions piling up behind it waiting to go on building and destroying as it moves towards nothing. . .