Frederick David Abraham,
Silliman University (Philippines)
(in press Silliman Journal, 2007)
A conversation among classmates Fred Abraham, Walker Patterson, Larry
Morse, Russell Cooper-Mead, and Herb West, from a day, October 10, 2004 on the
Internet-listserver of the class of 1956 of Dartmouth College.
Walker:
Jacques Derrida — may he rest in peace, is dead, according to
today's L.A.
Times online. For those of you not
acquainted with Derrida's work, perhaps this quotation taken from today's NY
Times article will help to keep you from ever making its acquaintance:
"Needless to say, one more time, deconstruction, if
there is such a thing, takes place as the experience of the impossible." Jacques Derrida
Larry, have you anything to say?
Larry:
Of Jacques Derrida, of Saussure, or Lacan, there is
little to say because they are determinedly incomprehensible. My son is taking
a course in critical theory at Colby and it turns out to be largely Derrida et
al. I tried reading his text, full of Jaques [Derrida], and the jargon is
so densely packed and so arbitrary in its intent and construction, that my wife
and I found entire paragraphs unreadable.
Try this: Frost's Stopping By Woods
contains a criticism of capitalism. The speaker is clearly trespassing. One may
arrive at these conclusions only by adopting the absolute postmodern position,
that the poem and the poet are entirely separate entities, that once the poem
is written, the poet's intent and the poem's context are entirely irrelevant.
It becomes clear, then, if one adopts this position, that virtually any
translation of any poem is possible, because nothing limits the most radical
reading.
So what's his name's poem — the NJ doctor — “Patterson” — oh
dammit — “Everything depends on a Red Wheelbarrow...” [from poem by William
Carlos Williams] becomes a critical judgment that sets the esthetic world
against the world of technology, i.e., the white chickens against the lever and
the wheel.
There is no limit to the precious and
exclusive world conjured up by Europeans because their world is so thoroughly
decadent that the extreme and the bizarre are immediately given credence by
virtue of these very qualities. We may correctly say of decadence that its
presence is clearly declared by the degree to which the normative is
denied.
Russ:
In freshman English in ‘Stopping By Woods’, Prof. Jensen told
us, of the line
"His house is in the village, though" that "some
critics suggest this is the destruction of the Christian myth."
Anyone else on listserv in that class?
Herb:
!!! Frost had no truck with any of this sort of nonsense.
Larry:
Jaysus! And how does this line do that? God, I love critics! What
would they do if they ever had to work? Or had to defend their
propositions with their necks?
Larry:
Incidentally, I talked twice with Frost and asked him about the
last lines. He said it was true that he couldn't think of another and then he
decided he liked the repetition. And just think of the poppycock that has been
adduced about that doubling.
Russ:
Quite so. When I started teaching, I realized Jensen was
testing us, seeing if we would rise to the bait of that absurdity. As I
recall, most of us made notes. I was too stunned, wondering where the
hell it came from. I was just a simple lad from a public high school in
Denver who had never been assigned an entire book to read.
Fred:
I'm in a rush, so I’ll be brief. True Derrida and Lacan (poststructuralists)
and Saussure (structuralist) are difficult reads, but their ideas, some
off-the-wall, some profound, can be made comprehensible by reading some of the
Americans who summarize and interpret their works, such as Poster and Surap and
others. Their ideas are worth study, taking what is of value and critiquing or
disregarding the rest. One of the books that review both the German and French
postmoderns is Poster’s (1989). The former he calls the critical theorists, and
the latter post-structuralists. He talks about the "vapors over the
Rhine" referring to the fact that these two schools had little familiarity
with each other despite the communalities between them. The Frankfort school
(critical theorists) included such people as Habermas, Horkheimer,
Addorno, and Gadamer. Other important post-structuralists besides Derrida
and Lacan included Foulcault, Baudrillard, Kristeva (more comprehensible I
think than Lacan; they were friends and their ideas have much in common),
Lyotard, and many others, of course.
Larry:
And Grumpy and Happy and Sleepy; but how did dance wear get into
this? Hummm. Anyway, Fred, tell me a substantive idea that was not already in
play that Derrida advanced.
Fred (10/15/04)
Hey, Larry. Glad to see that you are grumpy, happy, and sleepy.
Dancewear? We are all getting a bit curmudgeony (but laced with good humor) in
our old age, but not necessarily in dancewear.
Of course, your challenge may well be impossible to satisfy.
There are precious few ideas for which some precedence does not exist. I do not
think that makes new consideration of those ideas any less profound or
substantive, and in fact, often, quite the contrary. Great ideas bear
consideration and evolution. Originality may play out in the relevance to
current cultural context. And there are at least two flavors of precedents,
those that have evolved into the current discussion, a direct lineage, and
those of which the contemporary discussion is unaware.
I do think there are ideas of Derrida that warrant
consideration, original or not. Perhaps I can give a couple of examples. One of
his most important ideas relates to instability in language, where he starts
with Heidegger’s concept of ‘sous rature’ to emphasize the fact that
words often cannot adequately stand for that which they reference, that is,
they are inadequate to make an exact reference or representation. The word
sends us on a long chase for meaning. A friend of mine, Christine Hardy, French
but not even then aware of the post-structuralists, has written a book quite
postmodern in its nature, Networks of Meaning (1998), about how those
networks shift dynamically (we are both into nonlinear dynamics), ideas that
are similar to those of Wittgenstein, Korzybski, and many others, and
especially similar to Derrida’s views on language. Whether language has
instability or not, in Western history, is a discussion that goes back to the
Greek Cosmologists. Xenophanes tried “to reconcile the antithetical
interpretations of nature, first as an array of ever changing things [the
Heraclitian view], and second as an infinite never changing substance [the
Parmedian/Platonic view].” (Sahakian, History of Philosophy, p. 6).
Philosophy has been debating this issue ever since. The cosmological debate was
soon reflected in the concern for language (rhetoric), social action, and
everyday and political relevance, exemplified by Protagoras, who sent me a
letter via Internet in 1996, in which he said,
“Dear Fred: We certainly tried out best
to pursue sophia, which means wisdom and skill, to learn and understand.
We applied reasoning and humanitarian concerns as an alternative path to
enlightenment to that offered by the mythic-poetic-theistic traditions, which
were beginning to give way in our culture. Our efforts were honorably received
in our day, but have been tainted in time, largely due to the efforts of that
rascal, Plato, who felt that our professionalization of these skills in the
pursuit of truth in everyday social life, emphasized the skill as a path to
success over the search for truth. In teaching rhetoric and law using the
adversarial technique of having students argue both sides of an issue, we
sought to place the search for truth above all else, not the pretense to truth
by a better argument at the expense of truth. I was following the lead of
Heraclitus who made much of unity out of opposition as you well know. Yours, in
truth, Protagoras”
Heidegger’s concept of ‘sous rature’ (‘under erasure’)
also emphasized extracting meaning from oppositions. A word gets erased but is
left visible, i.e., as if crossed out, and one wrestles with the difference in
the meaning of its presence and absence. Deconstruction goes further, more
Heraclitian in emphasizing the process of extracting meaning by transcending
the apparent opposition. Nietzsche also emphasized extracting meaning in
opposites in Thus Spake Zarathustra, an interesting discussion
that I won’t pursue now.
“The guiding insight of deconstruction
is that every structure—be it literary, psychological, social, economic,
political or religious—that organizes our experience is constituted and
maintained through acts of exclusion. In the process of creating something,
something else inevitably gets left out.
These
exclusive structures can become repressive—and that repression comes with
consequences. In a manner reminiscent of Freud, Mr. Derrida insists that what
is repressed does not disappear but always returns to unsettle every construction,
no matter how secure it seems. As an Algerian Jew writing in France during the
postwar years in the wake of totalitarianism on the right (fascism) as well as
the left (Stalinism), Mr. Derrida understood all too well the danger of beliefs
and ideologies that divide the world into diametrical opposites: right or left,
red or blue, good or evil, for us or against us. He showed how these repressive
structures, which grew directly out of the Western intellectual and cultural
tradition, threatened to return with devastating consequences. By struggling to
find ways to overcome patterns that exclude the differences that make life
worth living, he developed a vision that is consistently ethical.” (Taylor, 2004)
Or according to Surap (1993),
"The method of deconstruction is
connected to what Derrida calls the 'metaphysics of presence'. It is Derrida's
contention that Husserl, along with almost all other philosophers, relies on
the assumption of an immediately available area of certainty. The origin and foundation
of most philosophers' theories is presence. In Husserl's case the search for
the form of pure expression is at the same time a search for that which is
immediately present; thus implicitly, by being present in an unmediated way and
present to itself, it is undeniably certain.
"Derirda, however, denies the possibility of this presence and in so doing
removes the ground from which philosophers have in general proceeded. By
denying presence, Derrida is denying that there is a present in the sense of a
single definable moment which is 'now'. For most people, it the present is the
province of the known. We may be unsure of what took place in the past, of what
may take place in the future, or of what is taking place elsewhere, but we rely
on our knowledge of the present, the here and now -- the present perceptual
world as we are experiencing it. By challenging access to the present Derrida
poses a threat to both positivism and phenomenology." Surap, 1993,
p. 35).
Taylor also emphasized the
importance of uncertainty for Derrida (passage quoted via contribution to the
listserver by J. S. Parke; a great quote, thanks J. S.).
“Fortunately, he also taught us that
the alternative to blind belief is not simply unbelief but a different kind of
belief — one that embraces uncertainty and enables us to respect others whom we
do not understand. In a complex world, wisdom is knowing what we don't know so
that we can keep the future open.” (Taylor, 2004).
Uncertainty of the present, of course, (I would add the present is
not just the perceptual world, but is also the domain more of the activity of
the mind) sounds a bit original, but the idea of the uncertainty of the present
has plenty of roots. It is the psychological world that therapists try to
penetrate, so interestingly popularized by Freud and Jung. Depth psychologists
usually admit there is no area of certainty. This uncertainty is also of what
most authors and artists are about. Russ just sent me a detective novel set in
1926 Shanghai (Bradby's Master of Rain ; a good one, just finished it
this morning) in which the intrigue is so great that the protagonist can never
be sure of the present.
In discussing Derrida’s relationship to Heidegger’s concept of
Being, Habermas reflects, relevant to Larry’s challenge concerning originality:
“We shall have to see whether the
concept of history of Being changes along with the tenor, or whether under
Derrida’s hand the same idea merely takes on a different coloring.” (Habermas,
1987, p. 162.)
We can see that these subtleties of language exist in everyday
life. For example take the rhetoric of politics when it comes to every issue,
such as homosexual marriage, prayer in the schools, the rights of Palestinians
and Jews in the Mideast. There are linguistic polemics related to political and
economic exploitation and domination. Most of these are linked to cosmological
issues. There is appeal to absolute truth emanating from Xenophanic-Parmedian
infinite unchanging God behind all things, Plato’s hidden ideal forms, versus
those who root their arguments in a pragmatic changing cultural context
(Heraclitus, Protagoras). The program of the postmoderns are to place dialogue
rather than ideology as the vehicle for cultural improvement, which respects
difference and change (see Taylor above).
“[Foucault, Derrida, and Lyotard claim]
that the quest for certain truth and the claim of having attained it are the
greater dangers. The logocentric philosophical tradition, with its strong
assertions about truth, is complicit, for them, in the disasters and
abominations of the twentieth-century Western history. On this difficult, even
tragic issue of the relation of politics to truth, poststructuralists in
general strive for a cosmopolitan position that makes every effort to recognize
differences, even uncomfortable or disagreeable ones, and for a theory of truth
that is wary of patriarchal and ethnocentric tendencies that hide behind a
defense of reason as certain, closed, totalized. Above all, poststructuralists
want to avoid forms of political oppression that are legitimized by resorts to
reason, as this kind of legitimation has been, in their view, one of the
paradoxical and lamentable developments of recent history.” (Poster, 1989, 16).
Let me briefly examine ideas from this wonderful friendly
interchange on our listserver, first with respect to the discussion of Derrida
and Frost, and then concerning the ideas of originality that Larry’s challenge
brought in.
I want to start with Larry’s introduction of Frost. While I am
about to critique some aspects of it, I want to point out that I consider his
response to Walker’s prodding, despite being a quick reply, was, quite
brilliant, and established some basic, legitimate, oppositions, right away that
relate to the concepts of linguistic stability to which I have just alluded. He
implies that, in contradistinction to Derrida, there is an area of certainty,
of presence, in Frost’s poem. He claims that postmodernists adhere to an
absolute relativism that admits any interpretation as legitimate, and these
could be unintended by Frost, and therefore unallowable. Would the
postmodernist wince at being called an absolutist? Even an absolute
relativists; a resolvable paradox. There is some legitimacy to this contention
of Larry’s. If deconstruction were simply the iterative stripping away of
meaning then you get to a complete, or absolute nihilism. But as Taylor noted,
this is not what deconstruction is about. It is more like philosophical
hermeneutics, which combines analysis with rhetoric, critique with
reconstruction (Crucius, 1991). If there is any fallacy here, it is in implying
that to allow more than one interpretation means to allow any interpretation. I
don’t think the postmodernists would say that. Frost clearly works from some
area of certainty (but probably not perfect even for him; I would suspect he
gets additional meanings upon rereading his own poems), a part of which we can
share, part of which we cannot. The reader’s experiences will borrow some
images from their own memories; some may just have to imagine a snowy wood,
never having seen one other than in movies and pictures. Are some
interpretations completely off the wall, or can they have some meaning for the
reader, even though seeming absurd to another (capitalism, Christianity in the
discussion?) Just because Frost may not have considered or intended them, are
they not legitimate excursions for the reader? Of course, when the reader
claims that their interpretation is that which is true and intended by Frost,
then they have ‘trespassed’ and this is clearly the claim of Larry’s, which is
certainly a legitimate point of view. And what does raising the ownership of
the woods in ‘Stopping by Woods’ or the blueberries in ‘Blueberries’ mean? What
is worth exploring there even if claim cannot be made as to exactly what is
Frost’s meaning? I remember that I had
a totally wrong (was it?) interpretation of both ‘The Road Not Taken” and
‘Mending Wall’, and I was happy to reject my misinterpretation of them when I
heard Frost speak to the Great Issues course in 1956, and when I spoke to him
afterward about them. Does ‘Mending Wall’ have anything to do with oppositions?
Does it have some communality with Derrida? We will never be certain, but it is
worth thinking about. And was my thought that Frost’s ‘Road Not Taken’ may have
had a twinge of autobiography in it, more than just a letter to a friend urging
him to become a war poet. I had thought he referred to his own short stay as a
student at Dartmouth, which I learned about during our initial week or
orientation and which I thought was so admirable. Maybe there was a touch of
that in the poem anyway. Maybe part of his being too old to go off to war
himself was in there also? I cannot say. I only know that it is the most meaningful
of his poems to me as a consolation of my own paths in life. And I named my
institute, the Blueberry Brain Institute, an institute of one person, its own
contradiction, for its personal political meanings for myself, derivative from
‘Blueberries’. Poetry is built with metaphoric ambiguities to make reference to
experiences (in contradistinction to precise scientific/technological
meanings?). Are experiences found in reading poems mostly beyond words? Can
they have exact meanings? Can those experiences actually felt in a snowy wood
have permanently etched meanings? For me that is one of the meanings of the
poem is the transitory nature and the immediacy of the experience in the
moment. I wouldn’t foist that off on anyone else though. At any rate, I would
amend Larry’s criticism that postmodern implies that any interpretation of a
poem is legitimate. It may be more to the point that ‘interpretation’ may be
the wrong word, lets put it under sous rature; maybe ‘experiencing’ is
the better word. Maybe it is uncertain as to what words best explain what a
poem is.
Larry’s next proposition I wish to mention is that ‘Stopping by
Woods’ ‘sets the esthetic world against the world of technology’. I just
concurred in a sense by mentioning a difference between poetry and science, but
I created a false distinction, one of degree more than substance. Science seems
to look for absolute truths, but science, despite rules for objectivity,
usually has trouble with definitions, and laws found are temporary. It too is fluid,
ever changing. We scientists may be less sure of our domain than the poet. But
is certainty or uncertainty or both what Frost is doing with his poem? It be
more appropriate to start thinking of the absent owner as in a position of
objectivity toward his or her distant property, in contradistinction to the
immediate experiencing of the snowy woods, but that still does not resolve the
certainty issue. But that again is my interpretation, and interpretations are
also objective, not subjective. When I read the poem I think of the coming
winter when I will be out alone cross-country skiing (when younger it included
being on horseback) through the woods here in Vermont. This is an important
distinction. And what does aesthetic mean? Should we put that word ‘sous
rature’? Meanings in words may be more elusive than apparent. I like
Larry’s points, and want to make sure that we do not have a contentious
difference, but a mutual searching for some meaning and value in our lives. We
should not feel threatened by our differences. We should revel in them.
So, are Derrida’s ideas original? Not entirely, of course, but
to a large degree, I think they are. There is no “immediately area of
certainty” (Surap, 1993), but Derrida’s presentation of them is decidedly
unique and useful, provocative, with many original extensions of the concepts,
and leads to the further evolution of ideas. Do these ideas have relevance to
social change and the improvement of the human condition? I think that the
Paris revolts of May 1968 (at which he spoke; I saw similar ones in Germany in
1967), in which workers and intellectuals united, shows that many think it
possible.
References
Crucius, T. W. (1991). A
Teacher’s Introduction to Philosophical Hermeneutics. Urbana: National
Council of Teachers of English.
Derrida, J. (1967). Of
Grammatology. Baltimore and London: John Hopkins.
Derrida, J. (1967). Speech
and Phenomena. Evanston: Northwestern.
Derrida, J. (1967, 1978). Writing
and Difference. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Habermas, J. (1987). VII.
Beyond a Temporalized Philosophy of Origins: Jackques Derrida’s Critique of
Phonocentrism. In, J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity:
Twelve Lectures. F.G. Lawrence, trans. Original in German, 1985. Cambridge:
MIT.
Hardy, C. (1998). Networks
of meaning: A Bridge between Mind and Matter. Westport, CT: Praeger.
Poster, L. (1989). Critical
Theory and Poststructuralism. Ithica: Cornell.
Sahakian, W.S. (1968). History
of Philosophy. New York: HarperCollins.
Surap, M. (1993). Post-structuralism
and Postmodernism, 2nd ed. Athens: Georgia.
Taylor, M. C. (2004). “What
Derrida Really Meant.” [Thanks to Herb West for forwarding this article.]
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/14/opinion/14taylor.html?ex=1098772231&ei=1&en=614d4201c8942e7b)