Principia Deconstructivia

Just when I'm ready to give up on the whole enterprise I stumble across a post like this one that raises interesting issues that were apparently inspired by Derrida. Of course one reason I like it is that Bérubé is a clearer writer than Derrida and situates the latter's contributions within a broader framework that acknowledges both its strengths and its weaknesses. Plus it's a short punchy blog post instead of a long dense philosophical treatise.

It's not Derrida's fault that he doesn't have the perspective to situate his work within a broader context, or objectively evaluate its faults. (Presumably plenty of weak arguments got cut from the final draft.) J.D. was the first one out of the gate with his particular program, and a certain level of obscurity is just the side effect of intellectual creativity. He couldn't do anything but what he did. In this respect he's no different from anyone else who introduces an original idea. You have to cut them some slack, because what matters is not so much what they say but how it ends up becoming part of the background. (Bérubé's seeping-into-the-groundwater metaphor is particularly apt here.) If a philosopher spends their life writing a near-indecipherable mass of verbiage that someone eventually boils down into a Wikipedia article, they've pretty much done their job.

So some of my frustration with J.D. may be a frustration with reading primary sources in general. As someone who works in the sciences (or at least "sciences" in the case of linguistics) I'm used to viewing primary sources as inherently incoherent and unmoored. For example, there is a large component of physics known as "Newtonian physics"–a crucial body of knowledge that helps us keep planes aloft, prevent bridges from collapsing, land probes on Mars, all kinds of neat things. This body of knowledge has its origins in a particular historical figure, Isaac Newton, and a particular book, the Principia Mathematica, and physicists speak of both reverentially. However, no one actually reads the Principia today except as a historical document. It would be a huge waste of time to try and learn Newton's ideas from Newton's words–you're better off picking up a freshman physics textbook, which three centuries' worth of hindsight has rendered vastly easier to comprehend.

I gather that this is not the case in philosophy, where the fundamentally more idiosyncratic and irreconcilable nature of the material requires that you go back and read primary sources to truly get them. (Though I recall some discussion in the Translator's Preface of the way philosophers' ideas seep beyond their original presentations. So for example there's Kant the person, Kant the section of the bookshelf, and "Kant" the second-hand body of ideas, all of which may exist on equal footing. I remember this catching my attention because it reminded me of the Newton example, and intend to go back and look at it again.) So to some extent I'm just annoyed that I can't go read Derrida for Dummies and be done with it. At the same time, if seepage is the final mark of a philosopher's success, then you need skilled explicators to ease that process along. And I have the sense that a certain deliberate obscurity became the house style for many people working in this branch of philosophy. If so, that's too bad for Derrida, because it impedes the dissemination of whatever is useful in his ideas, forcing him to seep through granite instead of soft pliable earth.

Second Time's not the Charm

So I've opted to reread "Linguistics and Grammatology," going through it very thoroughly. I can't stand to write in books, so I bought a bunch of tiny post-its and have been sticking detailed notes onto the pages. Really giving the chapter due diligence, and I'm sorry to say that the closer inspection is proving to be disappointing. My initial impressions about the weaknesses of J.D.'s arguments remain, only now that I'm able to understand more I'm less inclined to think that I'm missing something.

Easily Distracted by the Empire

For my money, Tim Burke is one of the best bloggers out there. His thoughtful and informative response to the book Theory's Empire is one of the main reasons I was willing to give Derrida a shot. All I need is an acknowledgment that, yes, some Theory fans can be kinda obnoxious, and then I'm willing to approach the actual work with an open mind.

For my money, Tim Burke is one of the best bloggers out there. His response to the book Theory's Empire is one of the main reasons I was willing to give Derrida a shot.

Choose Your Own Adventure

Slogged through the last two pages of "Linguistics and Grammatology". Didn't understand a word, but I felt it was necessary.

I'm considering whether to stick with the Ulysses strategy of plowing ahead regardless of comprehension, or going back and rereading this chapter. I'm leaning towards the latter. I'd like to at least get a precis written down, so that it doesn't all vanish into the air.

Backhanded Back Cover Praise

A blurb on the back of my copy from Roger Poole:

Of Grammatology is the tool-kit for anyone wants to empty the 'presence' out of any text he has taken a dislike to. A handy arsenal of deconstructive tools are to be found in its pages, and the technique, once learnt, is as simple, and as destructive, as leaving a bomb in a brown paper bag outside (or inside) a pub.

The bit about leaving a bomb in a pub is in poor taste, but the rest sounds like high praise to me. A fellow linguist once remarked to me, vis à via Noam Chomsky's legendary forensic skills, "His special mutant power is that he can win any argument he gets in even if he's wrong." Even when you know the debating trick well enough to see through its disigenuity, you can still admire its artfulness. I'm a conoisseur, and I'm hoping to learn some killer debater's tricks from Derrida in the form of "deconstruction" but I haven't seen them yet.

Also, what a weird backhanded compliment to have as one of your featured blurbs. Sure it draws in guys like me, but it also sounds like a roundabout way of calling Derrida the king of the bullshitters.

A Glimmer

I'm mostly rolling my eyes and nitpicking my way through "Linguistics and Grammatology", but at the very end there I get the glimmer of the outline of an interesting idea that Derrida might be getting at maybe: this notion that our whole apprehension of reality may proceed through a perception of differences and that this mechanism bears a strong resemblance to the way we read. (As in literally read actual text.) This is how I take the passage on pg. 70 that begins "If the trace, arche-phenomenon of 'memory'...". There's even something lyrical about the idea that all of us go through life writing and reading the great text of the world. (Anyway, it sounded lyrical until I wrote it out just now, and then it sounded corny.)

I'm intrigued enough to try and understand this chapter better.