Meeting Derrida

I remember the very first time I ever heard about Plato's cave. I think I was about 16. (My father had given me Bertrand Russell's "A History of Western Philosophy"). At first I had a hard time grasping the metaphor of it and then, once I did, I got very angry. Who the hell was this dead Greek guy to tell me that everything I had experienced all my life was illusion? And that I had been too stupid to notice it.

A little later, in my early twenties, I had to read Descartes's "Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason". I didn't take well to the idea of having to leave common sense behind and questioning things I felt were obvious.

At the age of twenty-eight, I was diagnosed with manic-depression and, after a lengthy talk, my wonderful Czech psychiatrist handed me his personal copy of "Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason" by Michel Foucault. He proscribed me medication, asked me to read it, and then decide whether, in light of what I'd read, I wanted to keep on taking the medication or not.

I went on to read a number of other books by Foucault. The idea that all the structures of power around me where not what I imagined them to be, what I was taught they were, scared me. Well, first it annoyed me that, again, I was being asked to question what I felt was a given reality. Then it scared me. Then I calmed down about it.

Many years later and somewhat saner and now writing, I read Barthes' "Image-Music-Text". I took to the idea of everything having "text" quite well. However, my first reaction to "The Death of the Author" wasn't a particularly accepting one. It took me a while to see the possibilities in reading available to a "writerly reader".

When I started this masters, I read a little of Daniel Chandler's "Semiotics for Beginners" online and balked a little. As good a writer as Chandler is, it's dense going at first and it takes a couple of re-readings to get some of the ideas. In the end, I bought the book when I was in London because I wanted to make sure he got some money.

Similarly, my initial run-in in with the structuralists wasn't a happy one. Who likes being told they aren't really a creative being, that the language "uses" us, and that that language is a construction of what society dictates?

Now along comes Derrida, who claims we can't even have any confidence that what we think we mean IS what we mean. And certainly we can't make any claim at all to being assured that anyone else will make any sense at all of what we say, or write.

We are, it seems, a bunch of walking automatons. Out of our mouths and our pens we leak not what we mean to say at all, but the detritus of our cultural biases, the viral load of our overlords and, sometimes - by sheer fluke - nonsense.

And here, all the time we were writing, we thought we were makers and communicators of meaning, masters of the universe.

If I were to take all the critical theory of the last 50 years to heart, I'd never write another word. What, after all, would be the point?

It's always worth, I think, keeping in mind that theories are tested at their extremes and that theorists write of their ideas at the extremes to, in essence, see if they have legs.

Rather, I think, we are somewhere inbetween a state of being totally autonomous beings who mean exactly what we say, and the enslaved brainless mouthpieces of the state. We're both, and none of those too.

Reading Derrida, I feel rather sorry for him. He took on an impossible task of examining the fragility of meaning in language, with language as the tool. His writing is annoying in the extreme: repetitive, circuitous, full of words he's given new meanings to, unstructured and sometimes wildly metaphor-ridden. He's bloody hard to read. But having struggled through chapter 2 of "Of Grammatology", I can't in all honesty say that some of his ideas are without merit, nor that the questions he asked and the assumptions he challenged weren't worth asking or challenging. I've read equally dense academic papers that presented far, far smaller ideas than his. At least with Derrida, I didn't regret the time I spent trying to understand his ideas.

So I've been surprised at some of the reactions of my fellow students. One of them, reference to Derrida, boasted that he "didn't have to taste shit to know it was shit."

Similarly, I was surprised to run across " Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74," the obituary for Derrida, published in the New York Times, by Jonathan Kandell, who not only misrepresents a lot of his ideas, but also subtly attempts to suggest he was soft on Nazis by bringing up Heidegger's past affiliations and articles Paul de Man wrote during WWII; guilt by association, one assumes.

These aren't negative reactions to theories one decides are groundless, or disagreements over approach or methodology. They aren't even legitimate questions over the ethics of a certain line of inquiry.

These are fear-based reactions reminiscent of McCarthyism. Like the fabled responses to the proposition that the earth wasn't flat, or that we might have evolved from monkeys, or my own reaction to the allegory of Plato's Cave.

Do ideas that are wholly without merit elicit this reaction? Usually we laugh at them, dispute their logic, and push them aside. So, given the reaction I've witnessed, I think I need to read more Derrida.

(960 words/ 3,080 and counting)