One of the tenets of deconstruction is that all texts resist closure. There is always more than one meaning to a text.
There is a kernel of truth in this. Because of our finite nature, there are certain things that human language cannot express, and because our nature is further limited by the effects of sin, our use of language is often imperfect. Furthermore, in literature, novelists and poets will often make use of ambiguity to express more than one thing in the same utterance, which, in turn, represents our complex experience of the world.
The problem of course is that post-structuralist apologists have raised the absence of closure to the status of some sort of epistemological absolute. This puts them in the awkward position of claiming that the sole closure is the absence of closure. If you mention this to a member of the post-structuralist priesthood, they are likely to mumble something about aporias thinking that this gets them off the hook, which, of course, it does not.
Over at the National Poetry Foundation’s blog, Harriet, Martin Earl offers an interesting ethical critique of this deconstructive tenet. Whimsically comparing the rise of deconstruction with the rise of digital cameras, Earl argues that one of the goals of deconstruction was to liberate the reader from the supposed tyranny of the author:
The author (read the death of watered-down Nietzsche), was downgraded to the status of mechanic, a kind of interface, or a content provider, and the reader (under the tutelage of critic-theorists, some of whom were poets themselves) was elevated to the status of avenging angel. Armed with the hermeneutics of deconstruction, no poem was safe. Augmenting the reader’s tool-kit with the latest super-hard drill bits was coupled with an attempt to politicize the reader whose duty it became to tear down not only the poem, but the whole poetic canon; the political project was grounded in, and justified by a very traditional American trope of liberating the individual (a recycling of the radically conservative vision of the individual conquering the wilderness, that vast and open linguistic frontier).
Yet, Earl continues, most readers do not want to be liberated in this way. In fact, being subject to the author in the traditional sense provides a form of liberation often ignored by critical theorists:
According to the Aristotelian tradition readers read (or, in his version, attended theatre) because they wanted their emotions to be purged. They wanted to experience the emotion of falling from a great height and then they wanted to go home and have a good night’s sleep. The American poetical avant-garde of the late twentieth century lacked the humility to give American readers what they craved, a cathartic experience, and instead tried, with great hubris and the new technology of literary theory, to feed them an agenda.
This supposed liberation of readers, which in turn becomes a form of imprisonment, reminded me of Romans 6, which compares the supposed benefits of being a slave to our own sinful nature with the benefits of being a slave to the author God. The former brings death—in this analogy, the death of the hard-hearted, supposedly “liberated” reader. The latter brings the ultimate catharsis—the redemption of our souls in the purging of our sinful nature.
June 26th, 2009 | 11:24 am
“…the political project was grounded in, and justified by a very traditional American trope of liberating the individual (a recycling of the radically conservative vision of the individual conquering the wilderness, that vast and open linguistic frontier).”
Pardon me while I fall down laughing at the idea that deconstructionism is a conservative project! I’m surprised that it’s not labeled as “fascist”; apparently “conservative” here is used simply as a pejorative.
However, Martin Earl has an excellent point in that most readers do not want to be “empowered” in the way that the deconstructionists promote. If we read only to act as “avenging angels,” imposing our own vision on the “text,” why bother reading at all? And in fact English departments are seeing declining enrollments. I can’t blame the students, for I myself would never have majored in English if the discipline had been then what it is now in most colleges and universities. Will the academy ever come to its senses, like the prodigal son, and repent?
June 26th, 2009 | 3:41 pm
[...] whole piece, because his “tossed off” remarks will get you wondering at the dumbing-down of America, and how our overpraised children and our over-idoled culture has become unable to make [...]
June 27th, 2009 | 2:30 am
Not specifically Post-structuralist, yet seemingly ensconced in the same worldview, see Harvard President Drew Faust’s speech at graduation this year. Utter drivel – “producers of doubt?” Please.
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2009/06.04/bacca.html
“universities serve as society’s critics and conscience. We are meant to be producers not just of knowledge but of doubt — of understanding rooted in skepticism and constant questioning, not in the unchallenged sway of accepted wisdom. More than perhaps any other institution in our society, universities are about the long view and about the critical perspectives that derive from not being owned exclusively by the present. ”
I think the Church carries the day in those categories…
“The enhancement of our role as critics and doubters must come as well through the education of our undergraduates, where we seek, in the words of the new General Education program, “to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar . . . to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to reorient themselves.” As we adapt to a rapidly changing world, we must build anew on Harvard’s long traditions of liberal arts education and of humanistic inquiry. These traditions can generate both the self-scrutiny and self-understanding that lead through doubt to wisdom. ”
and
“The privilege of academic freedom carries the obligation to speak the truth even when it is difficult or unpopular. So in the end, it comes back to veritas — the commitment to use knowledge and research to penetrate delusion, cant, prejudice, self-interest. ”
Oh, that’s right, it all comes down to veritas – this from a University that ran its previous president down the Charles on a skiff for suggesting that women and men might not be interchangeable!
I happen to hold degrees from both The Catholic University of America and Harvard University. I think often of the difference in the Latin text on each institution’s seal – Harvard’s is emblazoned with “Veritas” while CUA’s seal bears the phrase “Deus Lux Mea Est”.
Given the secular inability to define “Truth” as anything other than self-orientation, I will stick with “God is my Light.”
June 27th, 2009 | 6:39 pm
[...] FIRST THINGS– The Death of the Reader …. [...]
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