Deconstruction and the Cultural Displacement

Deconstruction, associated especially with French poststructuralism, was the intellectual fashion of the 1970s and 1980s, though it elicited considerable hostility, as well as fervent partisanship. To detractors, it seemed prejudicially radical, unwittingly conservative, or merely nihilistic. By the early 1990s, some of its themes had become almost commonplace, though its day seemed to have passed. Critics grew more aggressive, portraying deconstruction as discredited, its earlier vogue as an embarrassment, to be explained in terms of the idiosyncrasies of French intellectual life and American literature departments.^[1] However, just as deconstruction had not merited the privileged, all-encompassing role some had claimed for it, neither could it be convincingly dismissed as a mere fad. As a broad impulse, it had a deeper historical significance—and ongoing value. But even those who sought to place deconstruction in historical perspective did not agree about its center of gravity and wider cultural implications.

Used most rigorously, "deconstruction" characterized the current that developed from Jacques Derrida's understanding of texts, but the term was often

[1] Quentin Skinner, for example, observes that deconstruction "has only recently been discredited," in "The Past in the Present," New York Review of Books , 12 April 1990, 39. Quoting Leo Bersani, John Ellis notes the "arrogant frivolity" of the constant antibourgeois posture of French intellectual life, but he also traces deconstruction to the French context of the mid-1960s, especially to the rigidities of the French university system. In that context, he suggests, the deconstructionist concern with "authoritarianism" had some basis, but in the more pluralistic United States, the radical antiauthoritarianism of intellectuals embracing deconstruction was merely facile, though it expressed diffuse discontents, especially with the state of literary studies. See John M. Ellis, Against Deconstruction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 83–84.

applied in a looser way to encompass Michel Foucault and other French poststructuralists. Foucault and Derrida differed, and each found reason for some pointed criticism of the other. After Derrida charged that Foucault, in Madness and Civilization , had been too much the conventional historian in his way of using evidence and the narrative form, Foucault attacked Derridean deconstruction as a rhetorical bag of tricks.^[2] Such sniping helped persuade others that sympathy to one of the two entailed antipathy to the other.

Despite important differences of emphasis, Foucault and Derrida had much in common, and they can usefully be treated in tandem. They turned from structuralism for analogous reasons, and in doing so each accepted fundamental terms of what I have called the reduction to history. In response, each sought to develop a radical strategy—Foucault especially through encounter with Nietzsche, Derrida partly through encounter with Heidegger.

A certain willful extravagance has marked both strands of deconstruction; thus, in part, the recent hostile reaction. Moreover, some of the most astute critics charged that deconstruction was simply an apocalyptic recasting of relatively familiar themes. John Searle and Richard Rorty have emphasized that among philosophers, at least, there are few foundationalists to be found, so if the Derridean brand of deconstruction is no more than antifoundationalism, it is not very exciting.^[3] Derrida's unraveling of Husserl is congruent with the other assaults on the quest for certainty, or foundations, or a transcendent standpoint, that have marked the long revolution in philosophy over the past century or so.

By the late 1980s, moreover, the fruits of the deconstructive approach had come to seem predictable and unenlightening. Rorty refers to the "dreary and repetitious discovery of tiresomely familiar 'inherent strains and contradictions'" that came to mark deconstructive criticism in the United States.^[4] There

[2] Jacques Derrida, "Cogito and the History of Madness," originally a lecture delivered in 1963, reprinted in his Writing and Difference , trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 31–63. Foucault's response, first published in 1972, is translated by Geoff Bennington as "My Body, This Paper, This Fire," Oxford Literary Review 4 (1979): 9–28. On the dispute between the two thinkers, see Ann Wordsworth, "Derrida and Foucault: Writing the History of Historicity," in Post-Structuralism and the Question of History , ed. Derek Attridge et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 116–125. Defending Derrida from Foucault's counterattack, Wordsworth denies that Derrida's mode of deconstructive questioning can be dismissed as textual reductionism or mere "pedagogy." See also Christopher Norris, Derrida (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 214–221.

[3] Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 109–112, 125. Rorty here endorses an influential review essay by Searle, discussed below. Attempting to account for the extravagance of Derridean deconstruction, Rorty charged that Derrida had overemphasized the extent to which claims to closure are at work in the culture. In the same vein, Rorty argued that Derrida was simply making the familiar anti-Cartesian point, to be found, for example, in both Peirce and Wittgenstein, "that meaning is a function of context, and that there is no theoretical barrier to an endless sequence of recontextualizations" (p. 125).

[4] Ibid., 107. In the same way, R. B. Kershner asked, "How many times can we demonstrate that a given text is 'decentered,' or that it undermines its own apparent unity and referentiality, before acute boredom sets in? Derrida himself has avoided this trap, but it has proven more difficult for his epigones to do so." See R. B. Kershner, "Dances with Historians," Georgia Review 45, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 599.

was something comparably tedious in the way historians began routinely invoking Foucault and his understanding of power and knowledge. Even when critics distinguished the masters from the epigoni, they often disagreed over how the masters themselves were to be taken. Was Derrida offering rigorous arguments, or was he essentially an ironist in his approach to the philosophical tradition?^[5] Was Foucault to be taken seriously as a historian, or was he trying to subvert historical understanding itself?

Foucault and Derrida each reacted against the vogue of structuralism, with its quest for a new science of culture. Structuralism was trapped in its own historically situated modes of discourse, so it was a casualty of the eclipse of metaphysics and the reduction to history.^[6] But their encounter with the structuralist enterprise remained central, affording a distinctively French angle that enabled Foucault and Derrida to expand our sense of the postmetaphysical terrain.

Deconstruction, understood loosely, is bound up with the recent expansion

[5] Even Geoffrey H. Hartman and Jonathan Culler, two of the most influential proponents among American literary scholars, disagreed sharply. Hartman accented the irony in Saving the Text: Literature/Derrida/Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). In On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), Culler criticized Hartman for failing to take seriously enough the rigor of Derrida's argument. While recognizing that Derrida had made noises of both sorts, Rorty endorsed Hartman's reading and found Culler too anxious to find theorems that literary critics could then apply. See Rorty, Essays on Heidegger , 119, 128. Rorty's treatment of Derrida as "a kind of writing" prompted criticism from one of Derrida's most persistent and lucid partisans, Christopher Norris, who played up instead what he took to be Derrida's distinctively philosophical bite. See especially Norris's "Philosophy as Not Just a 'Kind of Writing': Derrida and the Claim of Reason," in Redrawing the Lines: Analytic Philosophy, Deconstruction, and Literary Theory, ed. Reed Way Dasenbrock (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 189–203, and Rorty's response in Essays on Heidegger , 107–118. Although both Rorty and Norris wanted to distinguish Derrida from the bulk of his American literary followers, their accents differed even as they did so. Rorty found the thinking of Paul de Man, rather than that of Derrida himself, at the root of the excesses and confusions in American deconstruction. Norris, in contrast, valued the rigorous unmasking that he found in de Man, yet he was contemptuous of "what passes for 'deconstruction' among American literary intellectuals." Whether "deconstruction" was taken to be a method for textual interpretation or an invitation to loose, unphilosophical free play, he found the American version to be "distinctly alien" to Derrida's own concerns. See Norris, Derrida , 14, 18–20, 159; and Christopher Norris, The Contest of Faculties: Philosophy and Theory after Deconstruction (London: Methuen, 1985), 9–10, 15, 70–77, 85–96. The most influential effort in English to take Derrida seriously as a philosopher has been Rodolphe Gasché, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986). In addition, see Rorty's critical but respectful account of Gasché in Essays on Heidegger , 121–128, and Gillian Rose, Dialectic of Nihilism: Post-Structuralism and Law (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), for an influential critique of Derrida's apparently philosophical categories.

[6] Geoff Bennington and Robert Young suggest that the "post" of poststructuralism reintroduces history; see their "Introduction: Posing the Question," in Post-Structuralism and the Question of History , ed. Attridge et al., 1–2. Key documents in the break from Lévi-Strauss and structuralism were Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play" (1966), reprinted in Derrida, Writing and Difference , 278–293; and Roland Barthes, S/Z , trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974; orig. French ed. 1970). Barthes had earlier influenced Derrida, but he seems to have been at least partly under Derrida's influence at this point, when he eschewed the reductionism of structuralist narratology and began exploring, even celebrating, the openness that resulted from the dissolution of the author as the ultimate authority. See Norris, Derrida , 219, 242; and Norris, Contest of Faculties , 28–29.

of the historiographical focus. Ever more of what we are seems to have been historically constructed, so virtually anything may be subjected to historical unearthing and thereby shown to be merely a contingent historical outcome, as opposed to natural, given, grounded. Such deconstruction may be reconstructive in its cultural aims. In the case of gender, for example, to show that a present configuration that had seemed natural was in fact historical is to allow a new way of making cultural sense of sexual difference. By the early 1990s, the scope for such deconstruction had become a commonplace. A spate of books excavated the constructed, historically specific element in everything from Africa to accuracy to homosexuality.^[7] As an ongoing cultural possibility, such deconstructive historical inquiry might afford the critical moment necessary to balance the hermeneutic strand, understood as the search for consensus, as the moment of bringing back together, in the wake of disagreement and criticism.

Foucault and Derrida serve that enterprise in some respects, yet each found something else more important. In devising their deconstructive strategies, they were responding to the kinds of preoccupations that led Nietzsche and Heidegger to their posthistoricist extremes, and in some ways they expanded possibilities along the axis that Nietzsche and Heidegger had established. However, French deconstruction also included an element of overreaction that tended to compromise the reconstructive possibility and to blur the point of the posthistoricist extremes. Whatever the reasons, Foucault and Derrida have been more widely viewed as antihistorical thinkers than as thinkers serving a renewed culture of history. So how do the historical and the antihistorical themes come together in their thinking?