Asymmetrical Information

From the desk of Mindles H. Dreck:

Deconstructing Martha

Those of you who stroll by the Bullpen every now and then will see I have coughed up a variety of articles on deconstruction. You will also have noticed that I make derisive reference to "deconstructionism" in a variety of posts on this page. Several of you have queried me about it. In the prior post I criticized defeatist reasoning for not providing alternatives. In this post, I submit to you that deconstruction-style reasoning is how defeatists can dismiss every positive contribution to the world made by Western culture.

Deconstruction originated as a school of literary interpretation, in which the meaning of a work was interpreted with reference to the "binary" references (a simple example of a binary reference is "good and bad") that are the work's cultural foundation. These binary references are inferred from the "canonical texts" (in Western Lit. the Bible, Plato, etc.) and the prevailing system in which the author operated. If confined to literature, this is an interesting way to turn one's assumptions upside-down to re-read a work. The invitation to challenge the assumptions of the prevailing system and structure, however, provide an enormous temptation to enter the political realm. A student at Brown interprets the consequences of this method as follows:

One consequence of deconstruction, then, is that a theorist's criticism of a given system is limited in that it is always dependent upon (and complicit with) the prevailing terms of that system. Deconstruction's suggestion of the critic's complicity with dominant social formations has translated in the decades following Derrida's work into the pedagogical responsibilities of colonial, postcolonial, and transnational cultural studies of imperialism and the struggle for decolonization. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a leading postcolonial critic, uses deconstruction to problematize the privileged, academic postcolonial critic's unknowing participation in the exploitation of the Third World.

It is possible that in practice, as suggested by this student, deconstruction has gone way beyond its original theory. Nonetheless, current practice is what bothers me, for several reasons:

1) It is a complex methodology for turning everything on its head, including logic and critical thought as well as...good and evil. As far as I can tell, deconstructionists believe they have found an excuse to commit a grand ad hominem fallacy: Western literature (and by extension science and culture) is evil,racist and false because Western civilisation has been Logocentric, Eurocentric and Phallocentric (biased towards Greek and French Enlightenment reason, absorbed in the Western perspective and hopelessly rooted in male dominance).

2) It glorifies the academics over scientists, writers and speakers, as only they are capable of deconstructing "canonical texts" (everything from the Bible to Newton's Laws) and thus "proving" their falseness due to the authors being....Logocentric, Eurocentric and Phallocentric

3) It is impossible to understand becuase its practitioners write in the most jargon-infested dense prose possible. Clarence Walton, who wrote a difficult but interesting book on Deconstruction's effects on academic, religious and political discourse, describes the problem as follows:

Derrida always insisted that deconstruction, properly understood, was not a philosophy but a practiced activity of reading always tied to the text it interrogates. Deconstruction can therefore never be defined as an independent self-enclosed system of operative concepts. As a consequence, it is practically impossible to identify what might be called a "deconstruction creed." Consistency is a contradiction in terms; indeed, it may be suspected that Derrida wrote in an overly opaque style to frustrate other French philosophers who, like Gilson, sought clarity in thought and word.

I don't like to go to bed confused (some might say I don't like to go to bed at all), but trying to understand deconstruction is a sure-fire formula for bedtime confusion.

3) finally, and most irksomely, The Yale Literature Department has been considered its spiritual home, although somewhat discredited by the exposed bigamy and compulsive lying of its deconstruction luminary, Paul De Man. De Man is appropriately cited in Columbia World of Quotations as follows:

Curiously enough, it seems to be only in describing a mode of language which does not mean what it says that one can actually say what one means.

This is the excuse for reasoning that pollutes the discourse of defeatists, and attempts to place academics and pundits in the extraordinarily privileged position of being the only "pure" judges of good and evil. As Walton said, "the scribe walks before the speaker." The scribe is also, conveniently, excused from basic rules of logic, because of their morally bankrupt Western origins.

A benign example is deconstruction-style criticism of Martha Stewart, which shows her to be the blunt edge of a colonialist and racist society:

But just how to interpret Ms. Stewart's cultural prescriptions is open to vigorous debate. In the introductory essay to their anthology, "Martha Stewart's Living: History, Fragmentation and Late Capitalism's esthetician," Ms. Wazana and her co-editor, Zoe Newman, explore parallels between Ms. Stewart's work and the psychology of colonialism. Through repeated rituals that center on cleanliness, nostalgia and setting boundaries, they argue, both Ms. Stewart and colonialists strive to create a safe haven in a hostile world, demarcating the imperial "us" from the menacing "other."

"You leave Mother England and you go into the bush and you try to carve out a place that reflects upper-class English sensibilities," said Ms. Newman, a graduate student in sociology at the University of Toronto. "You eat your picnic off china and crystal in the middle of the desert."

A similar ethos is at work in Ms. Stewart's advice, which holds out the promise of security through grace, beauty and meticulous order. An essay in the Newman-Wazana anthology, "A Look at Linen Closets: Liminality, Structure and Anti-Structure in Martha Stewart Living," examines Ms. Stewart's rage for organization as represented in an instructional article in her magazine on arranging sheets and towels. The author, Ashley Prentice Anderson, argues that linens are fraught with messy, primitive associations, which trigger in Ms. Stewart -- and in everyone else -- an urgent need for control. "You're born on a sheet and you die on a sheet," said Ms. Anderson, a graduate student in English at New York University.

Ms. Newman also cited recurrent images of fences, hedges and garden walls as well as an article in the magazine on organizing basements that portrayed the nether region of the house as a place of foreboding and disorder. "I connect that to a need to regulate, a fear of transgression and the need for clear boundaries," she said.

By imposing such boundaries, these scholars say, Ms. Stewart serves to stem unease about race, class and sexuality. "It's people of color, it's working-class people" who are being put at a distance, said Ms. Newman, who stressed that she was not accusing the literal, flesh-and-blood Ms. Stewart of racism but rather examining her work as a symptom of the larger culture.

Incredible how a home and garden show that helps people (who choose to watch) achieve a commonly desired aesthetic end is, in truth, an instrument of racism and colonial imperialism. What a tour de force of criticism! Oh- but I don't mean to be "too hard on Martha - I just made her Avocado Soup!" (that's an actual quote from the issue of American Studies that focused on Stewart).

Next time you read Fisk or a defeatist "Guardependent" editorial, or some such swill, think about how this sort of "reasoning" pollutes the commentary. Since the government and the (non-academic) privileged are hopelessly burdened by "the bloody record of the United States in the past 50 years and the seemingly limitless capacity of U.S. officials to kill without conscience" , our institutionalized racism, and a foundation of militarism and colonialism, the U.S. can make no moral judgement. Since our definition of "evil" is by necessarily polluted by our definition of "good", we cannot condemn. Since to reason deductively is to be guilty of "logocentrism", we are incapable of demonstrating that outcomes in Afghanistan are positive (see Rall). Since corporations are an "illegitimate structure of authority" they cannot benefit us, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. We are doomed prisoners of our past and our inherently racist "canonical texts."

Using the logic born in deconstruction to condemn everything Western is now a gateway to an "elite" opinion-maker status, an ostensibly foolproof way to become a "Scribe." Ta-da - Punditocracy.

Amusingly, deconstruction creates its own hierarchies and privileged elites. Once recognized, anything written is polluted by the elites' privileged status, and they are rendered meaningless on their own terms. Deconstruction (as practiced here) eats its young. DeMan discovered when his World War II-era writings were uncovered as anti-semitic and Nazi-justifying . De Man's paradoxical (isn't that ironic?) writing career became the subject of entire books.

Enough of this academic stuff. Let's talk about Winona Ryder......

Posted by Mindles H. Dreck at December 18, 2001 10:10 PM | Technorati inbound links