Literary Theory in the NYT

High Literary Theory in the New York Times: Stanley Fish on French Theory and Deconstruction (I’m waiting for the movie). Believe it or not, it was much more interesting than what Mo Do had to offer today– a Shakespearian reading of the Senate hearings.Fish discusses a new book on Derida, Foucault and French Theory: French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, by Francois Cusset and Fish summarizes Deconstructionism thus:

“the “I” or the knower, and the world that is to be known, are themselves not themselves, but the unstable products of mediation, of the very discursive, linguistic forms that in the rationalist tradition are regarded as merely secondary and instrumental. The “I” or subject, rather than being the free-standing originator and master of its own thoughts and perceptions, is a space traversed and constituted — given a transitory, ever-shifting shape — by ideas, vocabularies, schemes, models, distinctions that precede it, fill it and give it (textual) being,”

which is, of course, probelmatic for those who want definitive, “Yes,” “No,” conclusions about the meaning of life and such.

Fish discusses the ramifications of French Theory in both science:

“It [the "I" or subject] also thinks the world. This is not say that the world apart from the devices of human conception and perception doesn’t exist “out there”; just that what we know of that world follows from what we can say about it rather than from any unmediated encounter with it in and of itself. This is what Thomas Kuhn meant in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions when he said that after a paradigm shift — after one scientific vocabulary, with its attendant experimental and evidentiary apparatus, has replaced another — scientists are living in a different world; which again is not to say (what it would be silly to say) that the world has been altered by our descriptions of it; just that only through our descriptive machineries do we have access to something called the world.

and politics:

“For both what was important about French theory in America was its political implications, and one of Cusset’s main contentions — and here I completely agree with him — is that it doesn’t have any. When a deconstructive analysis interrogates an apparent unity — a poem, a manifesto, a sermon, a procedure, an agenda — and discovers, as it always will, that its surface coherence is achieved by the suppression of questions it must not ask if it is to maintain the fiction of its self-identity, the result is not the discovery of an anomaly, of a deviance from a norm that can be banished or corrected; for no structure built by man (which means no structure) could be otherwise…No normative conclusion — this is bad, this must be overthrown — can legitimately be drawn from the fact that something is discovered to be socially constructed; for by the logic of deconstructive thought everything is; which doesn’t mean that a social construction cannot be criticized, only that it cannot be criticized for being one.”

Nothing is good or bad except thinking makes it so and our thoughts are constructed for us, hence the need to deconstruct (impossible though it is). Fish even takes aim at Judith Butler!

Fish concludes (in agreement with Cuset):

“A bunch of people threatening all kinds of subversion by means that couldn’t possibly produce it, and a bunch on the other side taking them at their word and waging cultural war. Not comedy, not tragedy, more like farce, but farce with consequences…Read it and laugh or read it and weep. I can hardly wait for the movie.”

~ by erc2008 on May 12, 2008.