I asked my friend Jai Kasturi to take a look at the article that Derek posted a link to here in the Friends section of this site. Jai is a former engineer but now a PhD student at Columbia, studying, well, um, taking another look at the history of the world since Paul. His comments came in email form but he said I could post them here…
“…It turns out that there’s nothing to be afraid of…”
well, i’ve been saying that all along..
“…The quality of the actual analysis of various literary works varies
tremendously…”this too is true, and fairly obvious; thats why i keep saying its
important not to group ‘deconstruction’ as a monolithic academic
activity…Amusing article, with many horrific mistakes and an amateurish ‘first
pass’ interpretation of what deconstruction is attempting. I must say though,
the project (ie, deconstruction, pomo, poco) really begs for this kind of
thrashing because many of its practicioners really don’t know how to write
or speak in english, and also many of them have a superficial
understanding of what other deconstructionists are doing! The range of
motives and techniques and politics in this are very wide and many times
are even contradictory (two people can claim to be doing ‘deconstruction’
and not even be on the same page). So i have no problem with this sort of
thrashing; deconstruction begs for it, its truly absurd at times and takes itself
waaaay too seriously.However, the author does reveal himself to be amatuerish and quite pompous
in his own closing statement (‘we have to go teach them, etc’). He gives
his qualifications as a ‘rational’ engineer (and like most engineers he
totally misses derrida’s critique of rationalism itself; yes, derrida
likes his silly word games (and they are silly and pompous) a bit too
much, but thats certainly not all he’s doing!)Well, i’m an engineer myself; and clearly i’ve come to very different
conclusions about the relative value of decon/pomo/poco from this author.So much for his qualifications…
There are lots of problems with the article, but it reminds me a lot of myself when I first started bumping heads with the theory I came across, specifically in the field of modern history.
For example, when the author of the article says, “we wanted people to get upset about the actual content rather than the form in which it was presented” I can’t help thinking of how making a non-problematic distinction between the two appears to be an important issue that pomo theory has looked at but escaped this author’s attention.
The author’s little pat on the back of all “worldly” fields with, “My success in my job depends to a large degree on my success in so communicating. At the very least, in order to remain employed I have to convince somebody else that what I’m doing is worth having them pay for it” is setting up his own pragmatic career as an engineer to contrast the isolated field of academia. However incomprehensible and bad some of the scholarship being done is, he seems to have missed the fact that they seem to be more directly aware that their work and their claims have direct political implications. Thus, in the field of history, for example, the stereotype repeatedly spread around by the paranoid authors of the ISI book I blogged about which portrays multiculturalist or postmodern scholars (mixing the two as it does) as left-wing nutcases is probably at least somewhat more accurate than the claim that the “deconstructionists” are retreating into the ivory tower as isolationists. On the contrary, I get the impression they feel they are being re-armed and re-tooled for the new social battles of the coming century as the voice of Marx fades. Jai might also want to argue that the left no longer has a monopoly on these ideas.
The author of the article says that “Deconstruction, in particular, is a fairly formulaic process that hardly merits the commotion that it has generated. ” Derrida, or what little I understand of him, would protest that he has himself derided those responsible for making this the case. I was myself put off by the formulaic crap I have seen, but more recently I have been at least made aware of the stronger and more frightening critique of rationalism which pomo theory often embraces.
This means however, that I disagree with both the author and with Jai on the idea that “there’s nothing to be afraid of.”
I am afraid, very afraid, and I am extremely “epistemologically challenged” in the way the article describes. Indeed, I do feel that the epistemological issues entailed often results in, “a constitutional inability to adopt a reasonable way to tell the good stuff from the bad stuff. The language and idea space of the field have become so convoluted that they have confused even themselves.” It has confused me, but I will continue my study because I don’t think you can simply ignore the problems and retreat.
The solution is emphatically not to chuckle at the silliness of deconstruction or pomo theory and brush it aside, something which I spent years doing out of conceit and ignorance. As Jai points out, this engineer wants his fellow rational types to lure those poor bastards stuck in a literary fantasy world back to a pragmatic world where your usefulness is apparently determined by your commercial value. The thing is, it is not that easy to plug back into the Matrix. The ugly world outside, with its epistemological uncertainty and confusion, is anything but a pleasant fantasy, but the questions and issues that many of these scholars focus on, including punks like Jai, won’t just go away.