As I’ve been grappling with deconstruction over the last few weeks, there has been one central issue that I’ve been unable to answer. In Dr. Hogan’s seminar, he encouraged us to read books with a “generous spirit” towards the author. By that he meant take what the author says they are trying to do at face value: don’t critique them for something they never set out to do and recognize the limitations of writing as a scholarly activity. In short, writing can not fully encapsulate everything the author wants, so take what they give you and build off it in your own ways.

My problem in relation to deconstruction, then, is that it seems to me that deconstruction leaves no room for generous readings of a text. Deconstruction exploits the lack of the text to tear apart the text from within. While I “buy” the value of a Derridian approach to criticism at times, it does not allow for a “generous spirit” in reading. The gaps and flaws where language fails or the text is limited in other ways is where deconstruction thrives: finding where the words are not enough, or is simply insufficient for the author of the text to fully express their argument. A lack in the text will always be present. It is that lack where deconstruction lives and thrives.

The slight redemption I see coming from this death of “generous spirit” is the possibility for deconstruction to fill the gaps left by the inherent lack of the text. Deconstruction has the potential to pick up where the author leaves off, expand to not just critique the text, but also to complete and answer questions left by the text itself.

Or at least, that’s my “generous spirit” towards deconstruction as I understand it.

TL;DR: If you’ve never read it and are interested in deconstruction, you should check out Pale Fire. It’s an excellent example of a self-negating text or self-effacing writing of the type Derrida seems to advocate.

In doing the readings on deconstruction, I was reminded of Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov. The book seems like a brilliant, accidental (within the universe of the book), deconstruction of itself.

The book is written wholly by Nabokov, but Nabokov employs as his narrators two fictional academics working in the English department of a local university. One is John Shade, a highly-esteemed poet, who wrote the 1000 line poem, “Pale Fire,” the focus of the book. The other, Charles Kinbote, is unremarkable, except that he lives next door to Shade, and he is (likely) schizophrenic and obsessed with Shade. Shade died recently, and Kinbote tricked Shade’s grieving wife into giving him to only extant copy of “Pale Fire” and all of Shade’s notes. Kinbote is now publishing “Pale Fire” with his own commentary. The vast majority of Pale Fire is composed of Kinbote’s commentary and footnotes. The poem (30 pages of the 204 page book) is an autobiographical account of Shade’s life in Appalachia. But the commentary is almost entirely devoted to Shade’s relationship with Kinbote and Kinbote’s home country, Zembla (also fictional). Despite the poem’s lack of any mention of Zembla or Kinbote, Kinbote is certain the poem is about himself and the deposed king of Zembla. He even explains in his footnotes how Shade’s entire life and death centered around Kinbote and Zembla. Kinbote spends more than 5 times the length of the poem elucidating these imagined linkages.

As Kinbote spells out his stories about himself and Zembla, he presumes to reveal the true meaning of the poem. And, in fact, his footnotes are very well-written and add a lot of meaning to the already moving poem (Nabokov wrote them, after all). But they simultaneously and constantly undermine themselves, and set off *Creeper* alarm-bells. For example, Kinbote cites one line from Shade’s poem – “Today I’m sixty-one.” – to go into a 2.5 page explanation of how Shade failed to invite Kinbote to Shade’s birthday party, but Kinbote knew it was only because Shade disliked birthday parties, so Kinbote spent the night watching Shade’s party from his window and went over the next day with an expensive gift. This, the footnote implies, is the actual subtext of the line “Today I’m sixty-one.” Not Lolita creepy, but still pretty creepy. (Of course, in the spirit of deconstruction, it’s possible that Kinbote can be trusted as a narrator and his descriptions can be trusted as accurate to the world of the text; the book gives no definitive evidence either way.)

The poem itself is very rich in meaning. And the commentary constantly adds to that meaning and undermines its own meaning. At the same time as this, the text itself illuminates the footnotes, and the footnotes mark out contradictions within the text. The nature of the book – a relatively short poem with abundant footnotes referring the reader to other texts – is profoundly intertextual. And every element of the book is constantly unsettling both itself and the other elements.

In these senses, it is a beautiful enactment of deconstruction. And, with apologies to Derrida, Nabokov is a way better writer than Derrida and refuses Derrida’s sometimes-gimmicky tactics.

While at NCA this past weekend, I saw a panel on “rhetoric and affect” which made me reconsider some of the analytic utility of deconstruction. Dr. Brian Ott and Dr. Greg Dickinson gave the most concise overview of “affect theory” that I’d ever heard. Ott and Dickinson foregrounded two basic premises: 1) rhetoric is related and inter-weaved with what most people consider the material, concrete, or physical components of reality, 2) “affect” is itself non-representational and a-signifying. All the panelists theorized around these two points, but none of them attempted to explain a method for applying the theory to a particular text or series of texts, or how to trace the ways in which the symbolic is enmeshed with the physical or material dimensions.

I was curious how affect theorists would react to Derrida’s notions of deconstruction and differance. First, I do not think Derrida would entirely disagree with the first claim. Derrida was partly inspired by Georges Bataille’s theory of “base materialism,” which argues that the material world, while real, is conceptually irreducible and always disrupts human thinking which tries to understand it through some stable idea. While I think this common ground between Derrida and “affect theory” is notable, base materialism pushes against any attempts to fully account for the material. Affect theory, as I (sort of) understand it, does try to account for the interconnection of symbolic and material through understanding how spaces, objects, and bodies coordinate and impact behavior. This project, reconceived vis-a-vis Derrida, would be to interrogate and challenge discourse that hinges upon the binary logic of material-symbolic.

Second, I think Derrida’s theory would throw into question the ability for affect theorists to account for the a-representational and the a-signifying. This is in part because the nature of writing is constantly implicated through differance and the endless play of signification. This poses an enormous challenge for affect theorists who seek to represent the un-representable. I think affect theorists could greatly benefit from a dialogue with Derrida’s work at this precise point. Derrida’s reflexive and deconstructive method seems like a much more fine-grained analysis of how an “absence” informs discourse without hinging on any ultimate metaphysics. Affect, without a clear statement of its textual method, risks reifying a metaphysics of presence unless it clearly distinguishes its textual method from Derrida’s. Or, perhaps, affect theory can integrate and expound upon deconstruction with an eye toward the hierarchies and binaries that constitute “affect.” Otherwise, affect theory may not find a vital praxis.

So, the Timothy Barney and the Michel de Certeau were particularly of interest to me. (this is the one time I am going to be excited about reading from some French dude, so cherish it!)

I really find the objective and evidentiary claims that Barney explored in his article. I also enjoyed the discussion of space and place from de Certeau and how we talk about, or narrate, changes or blends the two. It made me think about how we use maps in the United States to represent things about culture and how they are often seen as unbiased ways to represent information. It made me think a lot about Amber Davisson’s piece:

Honestly, I did not understand almost anything Derrida said in Positions. I saw key terms that kept popping up and decided that my best strategy would be to try to define them. Differance is one such term. At first, Derrida throws four different definitions at us between pages 8 and 10:

1. Refers to some form of deferral
2. Refers to the type of differentiation in our language that results in oppositional concepts
3. Involves the production of differences in language (??)
4. “This unfolding of difference, in particular, but not only, or first of all, of the ontico-ontological difference” (???????)

Once I realized Derrida was not going to give me a straight answer (sort of reminds me of Marshall McCluhan’s Playboy interview), I went to Google to read some reviews of the book. They praised it for its clarity in introducing Derrida’s key concepts. Oh boy. Certainly Abrams work clarified a lot, but before I read Abrams, I went to YouTube and found this:

An oversimplification? Of course. But I understood Derrida better after watching this 3-minute video than after spending two hours reading him. Now I understand differance to refer to the problem of defining concepts (like “cat”) by reference to other concepts. I expect some scholars enjoy the challenge of decrypting the words of a man like Derrida. I’m not one of those people, so I will be putting this YouTube channel on my favorites list.

Deconstruction celebrates the undecidability of meaning in language and texts. Through its philosophy ( although Derrida might not agree with my use of the term philosophy here, as in his Positions he very explicitly claims that differance isn’t a concept, nor is it a philosophy, or a methodology)  of differance deconstruction posits the view that written speech in any text is at once a presence and an absence. In other words, written signs and their significations are never stable as they are always bound by their differences with other signs within a linguistic system. Their differences with other signs thus makes signs contradictory, as well as dynamic, in that in their difference their meaning gets suspended and deferred. Difference also “puts into motion the incessant play of signification that goes on within the seeming immobility of the marks on the printed page” (Abrams 243). For this reason, written marks on a page may seem to be static and present, yet their conflictual or self-contradictory nature points towards their perpetual movement between significations that limit signs from ever being fully present.

Derridian differance proposes an alternative view to the traditional interpretation that seeks to determine what an author meant in a text. Differance sets interpretation free from ever knowing a text’s or an author’s true meaning. It delivers the interpreter over to an infinite free play of signs that are never really certain, static, present, or meaningful. The interpreter could then either choose to gaze nostalgically over the certainty of meaning, or he could embrace the Nietzschean affirmation that joyfully celebrates the uncertain “play of the world” where neither security, nor origin, or truth ever presents itself (Abram 244). Or better still, an interpreter could acknowledge the morbidity of the not-yet—the uncertain future—yet at the same time acknowledging the possibility to create variety of different meanings. But would all those meanings and interpretations have the same effect? Or would some interpretations be better than others? What if some interpretations carry the potential of hurting a group of people? What is the criterion by which we ought to judge a good or healthy meaning/interpretation in a world of free play?

Fore-warning: This may all be gibberish, but I will try to be clear in discussing these extremely abstract concerns.

Between the readings for the past two weeks, I’ve seen the theme of circles and circularity come up a few times. Ricoeur repeatedly refers to the “hermeneutic circle,” and Derrida decries Hegel’s circle, Saussure’s circle, and the hermeneutic circle, and describes différance as something in excess to – or both inside and outside of – the circle constructed by any structure. I think Derrida says that circularity is inescapable, which means the key question should be whether that circularity is “vicious” or not. Riceour’s circle is not (it’s a “virtuous” circle), but Derrida’s différance doesn’t actually escape circularity, and becomes vicious. Thus, I prefer hermeneutics to deconstruction.

By vicious circularity, I mean circular reasoning by which something justifies itself, forming a closed, self-justifying circle, and becomes impervious to criticism, loses all resistance, and begins circling faster and faster, extending further and further, until it results in violence. This is the mode of some naïve religious thinking, for example: The holy text is true because the holy text says it is true, and because it’s a holy text we know we can trust it. So we follow the holy text to more and more extreme ends, until we arrive at something like the Crusades or recent terroristic forms of Jihad.

I think Derrida best explains this vicious circularity in Positions on page 28, when he’s talking about Saussure. Speech is only intelligible through language, Saussure says. But language only exists as an after-effect of intelligible speech, language’s material manifestation. Saussure becomes trapped in a circle where A is a prerequisite to B, and B is a prerequisite to A. This leads Saussure to seek out a “transcendental signified” as the true center of this circle, returning him to metaphysics This metaphysics is problematic because … of reasons never articulated in the readings.

Ricoeur’s hermeneutic circle doesn’t seem vicious. Instead, there’s a feedback loop which he explains in “The Model of the Text: Meaningful Action Considered as a Text.” His circle is between interpretation and understanding, subjectivity and objectivity, distanciation and belonging, or truth and method. He describes this as a constant moving back and forth, where each informs and refines the other. Carried by this feedback loop, in understanding we posit a hypothesis – a way that the text becomes meaningful for us – and in interpretation we apply method and Structuralist analysis to test that hypothesis. This produces a new, refined, hypothesis. Our refined hypothesis returns us to the question of understanding – to how we attempt to make the text meaningful for ourselves. This produces yet another hypothesis, which returns us to testing through interpretation, which returns us to meaning-making through understanding, and so on. This circle is constantly self-critical and productive. Thus, I don’t think it results in the viciousness Derrida critiques, and it doesn’t produce a self-contained metaphysics.

Derrida’s notion of différance, on the other hand, actually just constructs another vicious circle. Adrian Costache explains this pretty well. Derrida and Costache both describe deconstruction as marking a trace of différance, which disrupts the circle and moves us into another circle. But there are only two outcomes here. Either: A. We swirl about every onward, from one center to another, growing further and further from ethics, meaning, experience, etc. until we lose all ground and guidepost. Or B. There is some point of reality which enters and grounds the circle. Costache says Derrida ground his circle in the testimony of the other. Due to the alterity of the other, her testimony carries a trace of that alterity, a trace of différance. That trace provides some link to reality.

For Costache, this is just a return to the metaphysics of presence, which substitutes a new transcendental signified. The voice of the other is made present, as something that we can grasp onto and give us meaning. This is meant to disrupt all circles of difference, but really it provides a center, a point of access to truth and reality. I think this produces a new circle, swirling around the alterity of the other. Furthermore, what defines alterity is its incomprehensibility, that we can’t know or understand it, which prevents self-criticism. We can critique ourselves, but not the alterity of the other. This circle forms a closed loop and a transcendental signifier, reproducing everything Derrida critiques.

Derrida describes deconstruction as an event – something which manifests itself in the same act that announces its arrival. This may be an answer to my concern. But I must admit I don’t fully understand the implications of deconstruction as event, so the point is lost on me. And Derrida would probably want to deconstruct the oppositions vicious-virtuous, abstract-real, productive-unproductive as themselves centered circles, but I think Derrida freezes movement at the vicious and abstract pole of the circle, rather than allowing the movement between them that becomes self-critical and productive.

I agree with Derrida that this circular pattern is inescapable, but it need not be vicious. For Derrida, a circle is a circle is a circle, and it must always be disrupted. This leads him to elevate the alterity of the other as a privileged site of disruption. Alterity just becomes a new transcendental signifier which we circle around, trapping us in a never-ending process of deconstruction. Ricoeur gives a way to make this circle virtuous, so that our circular motion can move beyond itself, freeing itself from Derrida’s trap.

Therefore: Ricoeur > Derrida. (And I’m sure Derrida would want to deconstruct that opposition, too, but poopoo to him.)

Writing my fourth essay for the class, I found that I had to think about audience in ways that I had not before. Taking audience into account can be difficult, especially if we are wary of making assumptions about an “ideal audience.” Barbara A. Biesecker’s article Rethinking the Rhetorical Situation from Within the Thematic of Différance asks the critique to reexamine common conceptions of audience within the frame work of Derrida’s theory of deconstruction. While I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about audience in textual analysis, Biesecker’s work helped me conceptualize it as something that is not fixed and provided a good overview of the discussion of audience.

Biesecker writes, “whenever rhetorical theorists and critics contemplate the rhetorical situation, they do so with some notion of audience in mind” (Biesecker 122). When they do think of audience, though, it is usually as a “self evident, if not altogether banal, category” (Biesecker 122). The most common notion, according to Biesecker, sees audience as a fixed entity made up of a stable essence. She argues that we should think about audience in terms of Derrida’s concept of différance.

Biesecker’s article brings up the question: Is audience really a fixed essence? She argues that identity is structured by an “internal difference.” The essence of an audience member is not so much stable as it is fixed in an “economy of differences.” By conceptualizing audience according to Derrida’s idea of différance, we are required to think critically about the audience’s role in the interpretation of a text. I found this discussion quite interesting and would like to see her expand on what this would actually look like in a critical analysis. How can I use differance to better understand the audience of my text? Better yet, can I use Biesecker’s idea of audience to gain a greater appreciation for the role of audience in textual analysis?

I couldn’t help but read, in Paul Ricoeur, for ways to apply (to appropriate?) his theories to the work I’m currently doing on my MA thesis. In this post, I try to sketch what that application would look like.

I’ve been reading a lot of late-19th and early-20th century texts that predicted what the world would be like once human flight became possible. What would a hermeneutics of these texts do? By Ricoeur’s philosophy, hermeneutics has two goals: “to reconstruct the internal dynamic of the text, and to restore to the work its ability to project itself outside itself in the representation of a world that I could inhabit” (18). To him, texts always seem to be “projecting” or “unfolding,” verb-ing themselves all over the place. Texts move the world, impacting it and re-forming it. Early fantasies about human flight projected worlds that 20th century audiences clearly read themselves into. Novelists wrote many fantasies in which airplanes fought dreadful wars; after the airplane’s invention, everyone spoke of its inevitable use for war. In 1908, H.G. Wells wrote a novel in which roving air-fleets incinerated whole cities. Decades later, Dresden burned. Isn’t it fair, in some sense, to say that the Dresden firestorm took place in the world that Wells and others imagined? Texts that predicted aviation’s future unfolded worlds of aviation in which aviation’s inventors and advocates saw themselves. Thus seeing themselves in-line with those fantasies, they strove to fulfill them.

My thesis is deeply intertextual, so I might have just mis-appropriated Ricoeur. Instead of letting these texts unfold in front of me, here I have made claims about how these texts unfolded in front of the audiences who initially received them. Is this a hermeneutics of the texts, or of their reception? Is the latter possible? What happens when we try to combine Ricoeur’s hermeneutics with an intertextual approach?

He later writes about the “present character of interpretation” (119), emphasizing that any interpretive act beyond linguistic analyses of a text’s structure is rooted in the present moment of reading. And readers do not interpret with impartiality, but carry with them a whole lot of historical baggage, from “History” writ large and from their own life’s history. Thanks to this, an intertextual hermeneutics couldn’t treat texts surrounding the main text in question as “context” or as “receptional evidence,” since they have no better claim on reaching the past than anything else we read. Instead, these other texts are their own worlds, too, and we can compare the worlds that unfold out of them and in front of us to the worlds unfolded out of the other texts being considered. An analysis like this would juggle a whole lot of possibilities at once, and at the end of writing this, I’m not sure how a coherent project would actually juggle all of them. But it’s interesting to think about. Discourse, as Ricoeur writes, “continues to ‘say’ being” (19), and insofar as that saying is mediated into texts, and insofar as we can compare our being as it could live within one of these texts to how it could live in others, Ricoeur seems to offer us a dense way to get a new perspective on both ourselves and the histories we study. I have to leave the fruits of these new perspectives up to the imagination–an imagination, Ricoeur would be quick to point out, that this meditation on Riceour’s text has allowed.