Fall 1999 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies:
"The Continental Origins of Postmodernism"

Week 11: November 22-28 and Week 12: November 29-December 5

Stephen Hicks' Summary Comments
Concerning Jacques Derrida's
"Cogito and The History of Madness"
and "Structure, Sign and Discourse in the Human Sciences"
with follow-up

To: TOC Cyberseminar <cybersem@objectivistcenter.org>

Sent: Monday, December 06, 1999 8:53 PM

Subject: Cyberseminar: SH Derrida Summary

(I apologize for being so late in posting my comments on Derrida. Because
of two weeks of personal difficulties, I was unable to work.)

Derrida and Deconstruction
By Stephen Hicks

In Jacques Derrida's writings we encounter the skeptical and linguistic
strain of postmodernism, in contrast to the cynical power politics strain of
postmodernism that we find in Foucault's writings. Derrida and Foucault
share a common heritage of the Big Name German thinkers. What
differentiates them is their primary reaction to coming to think there is no
truth. Foucault comes to believe there is no truth, only power, and that
therefore one should become engaged politically. Derrida comes to believe
there is no truth, only the flow of language, and that therefore one should
play creatively with language. Foucault's reaction to the loss of truth is
to plunge into the often-brutal free-for-all that remains. Derrida's is to
retreat to an aesthetic haven of linguistic play.

In the remarks that follow, I highlight a few of Derrida's basic themes and
offer a few comments that are supplementary to those made in other posts.

Derrida is most famous for carrying on and systematizing the method of
deconstruction. For our purposes of understanding deconstruction, we read
his "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," the
essay that, according to lore, made Derrida famous when he presented it in
1966 at the seminar on structuralism at Johns Hopkins University. And as an
example of deconstructive practice, we read his "Cogito and the History of
Madness," an essay in which Derrida comments on Foucault's commentary on
Descartes's brief mention of the mad. As an illustration of deconstructive
style, Derrida never directly discusses the mad but rather nests that topic
of discussion within as many other discussions as possible. The result is
that Derrida doesn't actually investigate the mad or the rational, but
rather talks at maddening length about various discussants' use of the
language of "madness" and "reason."

The Context for Deconstruction

Deconstruction is a consequence of an extreme skepticism. The skepticism is
a consequence of an historical series of retreats from any sort of objective
and stable foundation for the contents of our minds.

Beginning in the early modern period, the loss of God or any such
super-natural grounding undermined the whole medieval structure. But that
was fine, the early moderns thought, because nature provided an external
grounding and science could thereby replace religion. But then, by the time
of Hume, we had lost an external, causal nature as a grounding. Okay, said
Kant, but then we can fall back on an internal, subjective grounding in the
noumenal self's categories and forms of sensibility. But then, by the time
of Nietzsche and Freud, we had lost any sense of a coherent, rational self
that could ground anything stable or objective. Okay, said the
Structuralists, but then we can at least analyze language and find in it
universal and necessary structural features.

The purpose of the method of deconstruction is to discredit Structuralism,
the last holdout of the "centered" approach to language. All of the
"centered" approaches to language -- from the Logos of God to the Forms of
Plato to the Nature of the Aristotelians to the Noumenal Self of Kant to the
Universal Linguistic Structures of the Structuralists -- have had two
features in common: the belief that language is referential to an
extra-linguistic reality, and the belief that language's meanings are fixed.

Derrida takes it for granted that all of those notions have been discredited
by the middle of the 20th century. So what's left? Only the ever-changing
contents of our minds -- except that even to speak of something so stable as
a "mind" is a discredited illusion. So what we're left with is the flow of
images, most or many of which are linguistic. As Derrida puts it in Chapter
2, "The fact of language is probably the only fact ultimately to resist all
parenthization." (1978, 37) ("Parenthization" is the act of bringing
something within the system of language and thus, on Derrida's account,
making it incapable of being an objective foundation.)

The history of failure provides the context for the more specific objections
deconstructionists level against the centered approach to language.
Speaking from the uncentered perspective that the referents of language are
neither extra-linguistic nor fixed, deconstructionists object to the
"centered" approach on three grounds.

1. On interpretive grounds: in its search for the one true meaning the
centered approach overlooks other, equally legitimate readings.
2. On moral grounds: the centered approach marginalizes and oppresses those
other readings; its doing so is based on the West's anxious compulsion for
top-down, fixed order.
3. On aesthetic/creativity grounds: the centered approach stifles further
creative exploration.

>From these objections it follows that the positive standard driving the
objections is that of unconstrained egalitarian play.

The Method of Deconstruction

The nature of the deconstructive method is to find in any text equally
legitimate readings that have been marginalized. It is, by parallel, a
linguistic version of those staples of the philosophy of perception, the
Boring drawing of the old/young woman, the Necker cube outline, or Jastrow's
drawing of the duck/rabbit. As the usual analysis goes for those perceptual
cases, there is no reality out there forcing a visual reading upon us;
rather the reading is changeable and a matter of will. Similarly,
deconstructionists search out examples in language to show that language's
reality is essentially indeterminate and so the readings can be as
willfully changeable. Holding that there is a single correct reading of a
text is no different than saying about the Boring drawing, "No, it really is
a drawing of an old woman." Only conservative old women would insist that
the way they happened to see it is the only way to see it.

As some of the commentators on this list have noted, the diaphanous model is
at work in Derrida's account of language. In analyzing perception, those
who hold the diaphanous model will point out that our percepts take forms
that have features that are different than the reality they are of -- for
example, an experience of a red object has features that are different than
those of the red object. The features of the experience depend in part on
the nature of the subject having the experience. And so, advocates of the
diaphanous model conclude, our experiences cannot be directly of external
objects; at best they can be subjective representations of objects.

The same analysis holds for conceptual thinking. Conceptual thinking takes
a particular form: language. Since that language has features that are
different than the reality it is supposed to refer to, it is neither a
diaphanous medium through which we grasp external reality nor a mirror of an
external reality. Instead its different features are a product of our
subjective nature, in this case our subjective choices -- for example, we
choose arbitrarily the symbols we use in language. And so,
deconstructionists conclude, we can just as arbitrarily choose other symbols
or use pre-existing symbols for new purposes. Nothing constrains us but the
extent of our subjective creativity.

Deconstruction and Politics

One can arrive at deconstruction thus via the history of metaphysics and
epistemology, but much of the use of deconstruction is political and
psychological.

Deconstruction implies a radical egalitarianism of textual interpretations.
This feature is attractive to those who dislike being told that they are
mistaken or who dislike having to tell others that they are mistaken. The
idea that everyone is equally right and that all opinions are equally worthy
is psychologically and socially soothing to many.

For those who are primarily politically motivated and at the same time
alienated in their social context, deconstruction is a way to dismiss or set
aside unwelcome texts that they otherwise would have a difficult time
arguing against. In the American context, deconstruction has been used
mostly in legal circles against the Constitution and the body of precedent,
and in literary circles against the canon of great books. This political
feature explains why deconstructionists are mostly far left wing in their
politics and located in America. Derrida is not esteemed in France or the
rest of Europe nearly as much as he is esteemed in America. Given that
America has the strongest non-left traditions of any nation, it makes sense
that its left-wing intellectuals would be most alienated and most likely to
need the most desperate weapons to attack it.

Deconstruction is also attractive to those drawn to the marginal and the
bizarre. Deconstruction holds that all texts center one reading and
marginalize the rest, and so makes it an imperative to seek out the marginal
readings. This gives to those who like the bizarre a legitimation and a
built-in defense against criticism. If their so-called bizarre readings are
criticized as being just too out there -- e.g., if it's hard for a critic to
swallow the idea that Shakespeare's plays veil a misogynous penchant for
crossdressing -- that's only because the critic is a fuddy duddy stuck in
the straightjacket of the old centered reading.

The connection between Derrida's politics and his advocacy of deconstruction
has never been clear. On the one hand, he was a left-wing activist in his
student days and supported left-wing ideas all his life, but for most of his
career he never made any explicit connection between his academic work on
deconstruction and his personal political views. For much of his career,
Derrida was criticized not only by his political opponents but also by
fellow left-wingers for the pure negativity of deconstruction.
Deconstruction is so ruthless in its destruction of anything positive that
it leads only to withdrawal into the academic word-games that most of
Derrida's writings illustrate.

On the other hand, though, in an interview later in his career Derrida did
say that "[D]econstruction never had meaning or interest, at least in my
eyes, than as a radicalization, that is to say, also within the tradition of
a certain Marxism, in a certain spirit of Marxism." Also, beginning with
the 1990s Derrida has published a series of books on political and social
topics. I have read only a few excerpts and reviews of those books, but
according to commentators their themes are Derrida's attempt to find at
least one value concept that escapes deconstructive analysis. His candidate
is the left-wing version of justice. In order to make justice invincible to
deconstructive reduction, he seems to speak of it as an infinite,
indestructible idea that arrives from who knows where and which we find
uncannily compelling. In other words, late in his life Derrida seems to be
adopting the language of religious mysticism as an escape from the bleakness
and sterility of deconstruction. This fits nicely with David Potts's
hypothesis of a central religious impulse underlying the style of the major
postmodernists' writings.

There is, finally, Derrida's ending his "Structure, Sign and Play in the
Discourse of the Human Sciences" essay on an apocalyptic note, one that
seems both purely destructive and evocative of religious eschatology.
Loosing deconstruction on the world, Derrida notes, is going to be ugly.
But we must resist the difficult temptation of being among those who "turn
their eyes away when faced by the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming
itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the
offing, only under the species of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute,
infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity." (293) That deconstruction's
results will be monstrous reminded me of the closing lines of W. B. Yeats's
"The Second Coming"; after checking, however, the entire poem seemed
directly relevant:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

[Stephen Hicks]


*************************************************
Fall 1999 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies

All Cyberseminar posts are working papers with copyright
reserved to the author. They may not be published or adapted
without permission, but may be circulated for purposes of
scholarly discussion.

*************************************************

To: TOC Cyberseminar <cybersem@objectivistcenter.org>

Sent: Wednesday, December 08, 1999 9:47 PM

Subject: Cyberseminar: Rand and Deconstruction

[From: Chris Matthew Sciabarra ]

I found Stephen's essay, "Derrida and Deconstruction," most
thought-provoking. His discussion of Foucault and Derrida's departure from
the search for objective truth is important, as is his overall discussion
of deconstruction and its context.

As a late addition to the cyberseminar, I was provoked to return to the
formal announcement that began this course. In that posting, Stephen
points out: "The purpose of this seminar, accordingly, is to broaden our
knowledge of the current intellectual landscape by exploring the
distinctively postmodern content, method, and style of philosophy. This
will better enable us to think about how to advance Objectivism in
contemporary academic culture."

Given this stated purpose, and Stephen's discussion of "Derrida and
Deconstruction," I began to think about the notion that Ayn Rand herself
engages in a kind of deconstruction as well. Stephen argues that the
"deconstructionists object to the 'centered' approach on three grounds,"
namely: on interpretive grounds, that there are "other, equally legitimate
readings" that are often overlooked in the "centered approach" to texts;
that "the centered approach marginalizes and oppresses those other
readings"; and that "the centered approach stifles further creative
exploration."

While I accept that Rand's defense of objectivity is at the core of her
revolt against contemporary philosophy, I have often argued that Rand
struggles against the dominant paradigms in a way that mirrors a kind of
deconstructionism -- in which she supplies alternative "readings" of
certain concepts that are central to the contemporary
altruist-collectivist-statist worldview. In a recent essay ("A Renaissance
in Rand Scholarship,"
http://www.nyu.edu/projects/sciabarra/essays/rprev.htm ), in my discussion
of Den Uyl's book on THE FOUNTAINHEAD, I note similarities too between
Nietzsche's "deconstruction" of "master" and "slave" morality and Rand's
own critique of altruism. And in RUSSIAN RADICAL, I argue that Rand
herself was suspicious of the biases in contemporary debate, challenging
the distortions in contemporary definitions of "selfishness" and
"capitalism."

Rand saw intellectual honesty as essential to rational discourse, but she
also recognized the reality of what Jurgen Habermas once called,
"strategic" kinds of communication, in which language is used to
ideologically legitimate certain statist power relationships. Her
examination of various anti-concepts is a case in point. At the heart of
their use is a kind of package-dealing which serves a definite purpose --
sanitizing certain social conditions or actions, and obscuring the actual
oppression of individuals. (Take a look at her various discussions of
"duty," "polarization," "extremism," and so forth, in which certain
individuals use such words to switch the terms of a debate and to cover up
their own assault on other individuals and their rights.) Rand's
injunction to "check one's premises" becomes, then, a technique by which
one "deconstructs" the meaning of anti-concepts.

I have used certain words myself, like "dialectic" and "feminism," not
PRIMARILY because they appeal to a given context of academic culture
(though this is a useful consequence), but PRIMARILY because I believe that
such words do have their origins in fundamentally correct premises
("dialectic" going back to the ancient Greeks and Aristotle; "feminism" as
originally the application of classical liberal principles and individual
rights to women as well as men). Whether or not my usage is acceptable is
not what I seek to discuss at this time, in this context. Yet, given
Stephen's preface to this course, I wonder if we might productively assert
that Ayn Rand was a "deconstructionist" in a certain sense. And once we
define that sense, showing how she "deconstructed" many of the
altruist-collectivist-statist premises in our midst, might use of this word
to describe an aspect of Rand's project become yet one more technique of
"advanc[ing] Objectivism in contemporary academic culture"?

I ask this because I was startled to see in the Cato Institute's
advertisement of David Kelley's book, A LIFE OF ONE'S OWN, that David
"deconstructs" contemporary "welfare 'rights'." An apt description, I
thought, a kind of linguistic sabotage in which one uses a contemporary
term against the very political interests that are most likely to use it
themselves.

I'd welcome some discussion of these issues as we move toward our
completion of this cyberseminar.

Cheers,
Chris

=====================================
Chris Matthew Sciabarra, Visiting Scholar
NYU Department of Politics
715 Broadway
New York, New York 10003-6806
=====================================


*************************************************
Fall 1999 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies

All Cyberseminar posts are working papers with copyright
reserved to the author. They may not be published or adapted
without permission, but may be circulated for purposes of
scholarly discussion.

*************************************************