Response to Robbie

Robbie,

You write:

"I will give up further discussion with you as a vain endeavor."

I suspect this will not turn out to be true, so I will respond.

You say I have "given [you] every reason to expect some patronizing comments
with a refusal to answer the question and a belittling of the request (before
answering, or half-answering, the question anyway)..."

But you are wrong. First, my comments about this discussion in my last post
were neither patronizing nor belittling -- they were a direct and careful
statement of my position, they reflected how I feel about what you are asking
and how you are asking for it and about the dangers I see in your question.
They spoke specifically of what I feel are the dangers, both personally and
politically, individually and historically, of approaching these questions in
the way you are and of looking for easy single-sentence definitions of
complex texts and ideas. I am sure you would never ask for a single-sentence
definition of "What did Salinger write?" You would name texts and suggest
that the person asking read them. By asking "What is deconstruction," all
you are doing is asking what Derrida wrote during a certain part of his
career, as I have already explained. I would no more want to put all of that
into a single sentence than I would, for any reason, want to reduce all of
what Salinger or Kafka wrote into a single sentence, and especially not for
the reason that people are unwilling to take the time to read the texts for
themselves.

And yet I have. Several times now. But apparently that is not good enough.
Because the page, the paragraph, and even the sentence were not clear enough.
 Well, that's exactly my point. This is not how these things should be
addressed.

As to "assisting" the busy people on this list, you can see my latest to
reply to Scottie about lending such a helping hand. If those people are
willing to read along with me, I will be glad to assist them. If they are
too busy or do not wish to read, then I really have no interest in helping
them until they have to time and desire to explore the question properly and
in a responsible way.

And I am certainly not concerned about whether you find this position and my
responses to you "condescending and difficult." Because, if, as I suspect,
your desire for what you naively call "plain-language talk" (a wonderful
phrase which speaks volumes about what you really desire) is reflective of
your alleged willingness to read those "long and difficult books" you keep
complaining about, and to learn the material properly, you are hardly the
sort of student or scholar from whom I would want to receive praise about
being "easy." I think responsibility to the text and respect for the
diversity and complexity of the ideas are the signs of serious scholarship
and careful thinking. I am quite happy to place those demands above being
"liked" and giving in to a request by those unwilling to read, a request that
I feel is dangerous and counter-productive in any case.

Those who want to know, who really want to know, will read and I will be
happy to read with them. Those who want the learning-nugget, the USA Today
version of Derrida's work, so that they can "recognize it when they see it,"
can go elsewhere for it.

In another post, you asked me why I spoke of my evaluation of readings that
use the text for support as "almost arbitrary" and not "correct." In the
paragraph in which the phrase originally appears, you will recall, I was
speaking about how I evaluate responses.

Here is the paragraph again:

"If one of my students asks me "What did Kafka mean by this story?" -- I
answer honestly.  I don't know.  I can tell you some of my ideas and some of
what I know about him and about when it was written and about the world at
the time and I can read it with you and I can give you other people's
readings of it.  But none of that will tell you what Kafka "meant by this
story."  I can tell you that when you write about it or discuss it, one way
you can determine whether your reading is a reasonable or valid one is by
seeing how much of the text itself you are able to use in support of your
interpretation.  If you are unable to use much of the text at all to support
your reading, I will probably not consider it as valid or as useful or as
significant than I will if you are able to cite and incorporate specifics
from the text into your reading. I am not claiming that therefore you are
getting closer or farther from what Kafka thought.  I am only telling you,
almost arbitrarily, that this is how I will measure your responses, by
noticing how carefully and how deliberately and how patiently and how
thoroughly and even how joyfully and yes even how creatively you read.  But
in the end, we will have read this thing.  We will have read it many times.
 We will have read it closely.  We will have thought about it and argued
about it over a long period of time and in significant detail and in
significant depth.  And we will, I hope, all have learned something."

It's simple, really. I use the phrase "almost arbitrarily" and do not use
the phrase "correct" in this case, because I do not want my students to think
that I am judging their responses based on what I think Kafka meant or even
what I think the story is about. I want them to feel free, even compelled,
to create their own readings, knowing, of course, that we have discussed not
only the text of the parable but the story of the writer and the history and
the culture and some philosophical ideas and their own lives and a bunch of
other things, including the relationship I might feel the parable has to the
act of reading and interpreting and the double-bind I might feel the parable
creates for the man who seeks the Law and cannot break the Law even as it
denies him admittance. I say "almost arbitrarily" to emphasize to my
students that this is not a question of them writing the "correct" answer
(which they would most likely hear as the one or ones that I gave them in the
discussion or the ones they think that I thought Kafka meant), but rather
their own answer, which will be judged on their ability to support it using
the text themselves.

But this paragraph is also quite relevant to our discussion here. Go back
and look at the readings I offered. See the spirit in which they were
discussed. I am quite happy to explain, to share, to discuss ideas in a
responsible way that refers to specific and careful moments of reading. I
always have been.

What I am unable to do is to settle for the sort of approach to such material
that you are requesting. What I wish to resist doing, in agreement here with
an earlier post by Cecilia, is speak in vague oversimplifications and
meaningless generalities and single-sentence explanations all unaccompanied
by real and specific reading of any sort. So when the discussion takes place
with someone who proudly announces that he speaks for those who won't read,
those who don't have the time or desire to read, those who choose not to read
for whatever reasons, then I will resist the request to summarize and
simplify at all costs -- because then the request comes not from a scholar
willing to engage the ideas and struggle with the texts out of respect and
genuine interest, but from someone with what I think is a dangerous desire to
avoid what is necessary to do the work properly.

That is a desire I will not encourage.

All the best,

--John

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Received on Sun Mar 9 07:46:09 2003