Deconstructions
john v. omlor (omlor@packet.net)
Thu, 10 Dec 1998 14:53:50 -0500
Sorry for this. I'm bored and don't leave town until tomorrow.
For those of you who have no interest in Derrida or deconstructions or such
things, now would be the time to read the next post in your mail.
For those of you wondering about what deconstructions actually do and where
the term comes from and why I think today they can offer rigorous and
valuable lessons about reading , here's a few little summary paragraphs to
get people talking (perhaps).
Deconstruction, in the singular, as a moment of reading attached to
the name of Jacques Derrida, began as a warning. Specifically, it
cautioned against the dangers inscribed into certain assumptions about
signs and ideas and the relationships between them in Husserl; but, more
generally, it called for a careful re-reading of an entire intellectual
tradition and history of assumptions that were allowed to remain either
unexamined or examined only so far within a certain Hellenic legacy.
Deconstructions now remain (as a warning) as remains, as a series of
markings and tracings of that which exceeds or escapes or spills out over
the borders of the taxonomies created to position those assumptions and
enforce by Law(s) the consequences of both the assumptions (about, for
instance, metaphor, grammar, rhetoric, Spirit, Dasein, performative and
constative utterances, the unconscious, the subject, etc...) and their
position within the various institutions created to preserve them as
cultural narratives that lay claim to legitimation. These remains re-cite
places of excess or unaccountability that deconstructive acts of reading
might use to interrogate the grounds upon which the assumptions rest. The
assumptions have had, always already have, the most important of
consequences in each of the "disciplines" that have been defined to
translate and disseminate the archive. These are political, philosophical,
theological, social, and linguistic consequences that are inseparable from
one another. In order to legitimate its own claims of danger without
re-writing another narrative of intellectual history (and thereby repeating
the gestures it would find so dangerous), deconstructions seek first of all
to read -- to read carefully, patiently, with attention, and with a nagging
self-reflexivity that makes the act all the more difficult (but this is
necessary for even the tiniest incision to be made into the bodies of
assumptions that host and at the same time are hosted by texts, by Writing,
as systems or networks of differences).
Even as a deconstructive act of reading would begin by affirming the very
assumptions it will also warn against accepting uncritically (because, of
course, it starts by recognizing the inevitability of its own inscription
into the archive and institutional tradition it reads), it also maintains a
second position of affirmation, a position of responsibility to the
language before and throughout it. Then, as it reads, the deconstructive
gestures take a second position of caution, caution concerning the very
significant effects (of the relationship between the text(s) and the Law)
that the assumptions inscribe and are inscribed by, by among other
faculties, memory. Deconstruction warns against the effect of memories,
both sketchy and detailed, even as it celebrates the possibility of new
acts of remembrance, a memory of introjection that always contaminates as
it seeks to re-cite its own acts of contamination. Its warning is sent to
the memory of the past in the name of the memory of the future. The
grounds that made the conditions of what it reads possible are carefully
and deliberately reversed and then displaced in (often) a playful and
performative collection of gestures (linguistic and otherwise) that
re-situates the borders, the edges, the gaps, the betweens, not in a
re-centered Other subject(ivity), but elsewhere as a dissemination that
always threatens to contaminate everything within its general (taxonomic)
geography even as it is always dissapearing into its own mark, burning into
its own cinders, remaining only as its own trace.
Deconstructions, therefore, are moments of a doubled warning: 1. take care
to read -- 2. take care to displace that which you find dangerous into a
radically heterogeneous, performative act of memory in order to reduce (at
least for an instant) the possibility of (hi)storical repetition (of
centering, of binarism, of phallogocentrism, of Spirit, of the Social and
the Natural, even (at its "beginnings") of geometry). Be cautious as you
read, as you listen with Other ears -- for responsibility remains as an
unsituated but crucial accompaniment to reading. Be cautious as you play,
as you perform, as you displace, for it is inevitably the simplest of all
things to allow the gestures which you seek to displace to reinscribe
themselves not in an Other position, but in a new Law, in the name of a new
Name. These two warnings, these two calls for caution at each moment of
reading: this is what, to me, gives deconstruction its "rigor."
--John