All Right I Give Up

Can you blame me for always thinking that Jacques Derrida was full of crap? I went to college in the early 1990s, just as the era of high cultural criticism was cresting. Even a physics major like myself could smell the Theory in the air. At first I was intrigued. Even back then I had an interest in linguistics, so another academic discipline that concerned itself with the way language was all bound up with meaning seemed right up my alley. When I started asking around as to what this Derrida guy was all about, however, I couldn't get a straight answer. One person would maunder on about binary opposition, another would start using everyday words like "author" and "text" in a needlessly obscure way, and yet another would lapse into rich-kid Marxism. When I'd ask for the simple example that made it all clear (the technique physicists use for explaining their dark magic to outsiders) none was forthcoming. I began to suspect there was no there there.

I might have left it at that, but while the content of Derrida and his coevals' work struck me as merely obscure, the style was infuriating. I'd encounter people for whom the lack of clarity was somehow the point. (A feature and not a bug, as I would later learn to say.) As a physicist and later computer programmer whose whole intellectual project involved making complicated ideas as simple as possible, this seemed inexcusably lazy. Then there was the way this body of work got all bound up with a particular brand of rote campus liberalism. For some, postmodernism seemed to be less a source of ideas than a badge of affinity for a particular upper middle class left-wing tribe for which I feel roughly equal levels of affinity and extreme annoyance. Plus it was disappointing to see a style of thinking that promised to radically undermine the notion of certainty itself get pressed into grinding out the familiar eternal verities that capitalism is pernicious, racism is wrong, and Republicans are jerks.

I got testy. Even second hand, postmodernism's distinctive textual quirks became profoundly irksome. Every time I encountered the late-80s academic tick of putting ironic little parenthesized (re) prefixes before key terms I felt like I was being nudged in the ribs. When I read that Derrida's obtuse style was his way of being playful, I reflected on the fact that people who think they are playful are precisely as charming as people who think they are zany. Through friends who were artists I saw the extent to which the postmodern style of speaking had come to dominate the discussion of visual aesthetics. I don't really have a dog in that fight–I enjoy the art world more for its air of upper-middle class conviviality than the work–but occasionally I'd stumble across a grainy video tape of a guy standing in a vat of jello with a rubber glove on his head reciting nursery rhymes that caught my fancy, and it seemed such a shame for it to be accompanied by a paragraph of leaden prose spelling out what it was a deconstruction of. (Usually consumerism, as I recall.) Derrida and his ilk seemed to have spawned an army of buzzkill pedants who didn't realize the joke isn't funny if you have to explain it.

And yet, and yet...My original curiosity remained intact. Academics were annoying long before postmodernism came along, weren't they? I couldn't lay the whole of ivory-tower pomposity at Theory's feet, could I? At least I could have the courtesy to try and read some of it first. After casting around some, I settled back on my original source of fascination, Jacques Derrida, because whatever else he might be, he was also clearly a philosopher of language. And of his books, Of Grammatology seemed the most directly concerned with questions of meaning and reference which were of daily interest in my new incarnation as a linguist. What the hell, I thought. I'll try to read it, and if it's gibberish at least I'll be able to say so with authority. I also decided that I would try a novel approach to reading this book: I would keep a blog as I made my way through it. This would provide a convenient place to put notes for myself, and would serve as a record of where I had been should life intervene and force me to abandon this project for long blocks of time.

So here I am, and here are my caveats. I have never read anything by Derrida before, and my knowledge of his work doesn't rise much above the Wikipedia level. I am unfamiliar with both Derrida's immediate philosophical forebears (Heidegger, Husserl) and his postmodern cohort (Foucault, Lacan, Deluze). The only other Theory guy I've had a crack at was Foucault, whose Discipline and Punish I read several years ago and cannot clearly recall. (Though I think the movie was better.) I know dick about Freud. Pun intended. My training in linguistics has given me a decent second-hand knowledge of Saussure, and an inclination towards what I think could be called Structuralism, which I think Derrida is supposed to be Post- to. Or something. My general stance is that of a reasonably bright outsider who is intrigued but not easily impressed. Nevertheless it seems Derrida and I share a fascination with the weird alchemy by which the primate squawks humans make at each other somehow coalesce into words, language, thoughts, culture, you, me, us. That sympathy will be our initial common ground.

All right I give up. I'll give Derrida a shot. The word "grammatology" sounds like grammar, which means Derrida is on my damn turf. Let's see what he has to say.