AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Despite all the claims I've seen for him as revolutionary, as voice of authority, as demon, and as fingernail-loosening fungus, Derrida has always seemed to me to be a sorta silly, sorta charming, hardworking, and sincere writer. No one you'd want to imitate, but fun to read.

But I've noticed a divide between those (like me) who read him first outside of academia and those who encountered him after his work became part of an orthodoxy, and I have a very hard time picturing that work sitting comfortably or usefully in such a position.

(If you find your calendar one month short, I'm also an inveterate dishwasher, by the way.)

Presumably there’s room for academics who read Derrida before he became part of any orthodoxy; I don’t know where we fit into this typology, but (perhaps this is the best way to put it) I haven’t yet been convinced that his detractors are more insightful than he is.

(By which I mean “people who generally have deprecatory things to say about him,” not “people who dissent from specific claims,” who very often have pertinent corrections and refinements of Derrida’s arguments.)

I rather like what Richard Rorty says of him in his essay which can be found here:

http://www.stanford.edu/~rrorty/moma.htm

"I think of Derrida as an important philosopher, one to whom I am very grateful. He has inspired me to write stuff I should not otherwise have written.Ý But I do not think of myself as applying his ideas. I would be hard pressed to list any beliefs whose truth I learned from Derridaís books. I have found him a liberating influence, but not a source ofÝ premises from which interesting conclusions can be inferred."

Twenty minutes to blog before I go sing the service this morning ;)

Short summary: The vision of meaning-making at work in Derrida can be found in more useful, less alarmist, better-textured and more human accounts of human social life than Derrida provides.

I think there's the knee-jerk, ignorant backlash against Derrida from the people, often older, who think Derrida's point is that Shakespeare has as much literary merit as Britney Spears lyrics or that 'everything is interpretation'. I can't really find much of value in this sort of response.

There's also the question of discipline - what's at stake when it comes to Derrida's claims vary greatly depending on whether you're actually doing literary criticism, linguistics, or anthropology. If your object of study is a tree ware - a text _artifact_ then what is surprising and what is not in Derrida will be different than if you study, say, everyday life in a (largely) non-literate village in the central highlands of Papua New Guinea. A friend of mine who studies Victorian autobiography at Berkley described to me once the incredible liberation that reading Derrida gave her. Having worked through at least a small bit of the history of criticism of Pride and Prejudice I can see why she would feel that way.

I personally have not ever liked Derrida's work. While I admit he's an incredible author, I'd never call working through his prose 'fun'. I want to agree with Ferry and Renaut - he is sort of all style. Or more particularly, a rip-off of Levinas with Derrida's style laid on top. But I know that this is unkind and unscholarly. He is a man with a vision - anyone who looks like Columbo has a vision - of semiosis that is powerful and striking. I wouldn't disagree with it so much if it wasn't so compelling.

The idea - to be extremely vague here in a way that only a chorister late to church can excusably be vague - that our interpretive actions involve finding a fixity of meaning which is ultimately elusive is correct. That recognition of this fact poses problems for people who try to get at a book's meaning simply by reading it is indubitable. Text artifacts are, like our bodies or RSS feeds, mere points through which the texts that make us up flow. I've talked about this before.

Now, one thing you may say to me is: Rex, it is obvious we can only solve this disagreement with our light sabers. Or, if you happen not to be Christopher Lee, you may say: Rex, it sounds like you're a young scholar whose already bought into Derrida's main point without knowing it - your own take of all this is already influenced by him. So no wonder, my friend, that you find Derrida's point trivial.

To which I reply: 1) I've got my light saber ready to go, bitch 2) just because Derrida is all about ambiguity does not mean ambiguity is about Derrida. That is to say, a recognition of certain things that Derrida recognizes could have another source, not him. And this leads me to:

3) Gadamer. Ricouer. Levinas. Levi-Strauss. Levi-Strauss is the guy who wrote a four volume work which he openly professes to have no beginning, no end, and no subject! Compared to the constant, changable wanderings of Levi-Strauss's mind (Way of the Masks? Look Read Write? What the fuck is talking about in these books?) Derrida is rather a one trick pony. After reading enough Derrida you can pick up any piece by him and know how it is going to go. Gadamer & Ricoeur: G & R recognizes that meaning is not fixed, that it is changeable, fluid, transitory, only partially anchored in a written text. But while Gadamer and Ricoeur take this fact as the condition of possibility for their work and, indeed, all human social life, Derrida present it as some sort of enormous problem. But why should this be so, unless you hold to a standard of meaning and truth that only the most absurd positivist would hold? Often times I feel that Derrida sets up a straw-man strong version of truth, justice, beauty, whatever which no-one but him considers credible, and then knocks it down. Think about network security: you can strive after much-vaunted five-9 reliability, but you'll never get to 100%. Does this mean the entire enterprise is doomed? Or, rahter, isn't it this essential non-completion that sets us in motion in the most trivial way. Let me put it another way - is there any room in Derrida's opus for phronesis?

Levinas: Anytime Derrida says anything about the Other, it is cribbed in a most terrible way from Levinas. Try reading them side by side sometime - it's criminal, really. Or maybe not - I guess Derrida openly acknowledges his debt to Levinas (i.e. he did make the big speech at the funeral).

Do you see what I'm getting at? The vision of meaning-making at work in Derrida can be found in more useful, less alarmist, better-textured and more human accounts of human social life than Derrida provides.

I guess one way to say this is that anyone who takes as their paradigmatic act of meaning-making sitting alone in a room reading a book rather than people talking or (even better) giving pigs for bridewealth (i.e. making meaning together) is naturally going to develop some rather erratic ideas. Put down the books! Get out into the field! Go initiate someone or something - that's the best antidote to Derrida.

AKMA: Plenty of room for everyone! I didn't mean to exclude that middle case; I just haven't personally met any of them before.

"You can't win, Rex. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine."

I have some quibbles with Levinas that I don’t have with Derrida (though I have plenty of disagreements with both). If one wants to restrict Derrida to “things are more ambiguous than we often allow,” then probably neither Derrida nor Levinas (nor Levi-Strauss nor Saussure nor Nietzsche nor. . . Kierkegaard, nor . . . ) thought it up, and I have no problem deferring credit from JD to maybe the Sophists.

Derrida doesn’t look like a one-trick pony to me, though , in the full breadth of the topics he’s tackled (and his recent entaglements with “faith” and “religion” intrigue me more and more as he gets deeper and deeper into the conversation.

So (a) I can’t take up light saber against you without violating my oath of nonviolence; (b) I wasn’t reading you as “generally snarky”—I do understand you to have a thought-out resistance to Derrida’s celebrity (at least), even as you took a couple of snarky shots at him in the review of the movie; (c) I don’t want to argue that moain point you advance by way of reply to my defense of JD; (d) you can squeeze more density into a twenty-minute pre-chapel comment than most writers attain with hours of rumination—did you get to chapel on time?

Ray,

I hope Jonathon’s on top of this. The UBlog Capital Campaign is counting on big calendar sales for its 2003 Fund.

I fall on every side of this. JD is a stimulating and acute reader. But does he dream? He can get one's juices going, but they seem to be intellectual juices, somewhat short of, for want of a better term, imaginative lift. He is onto big and important things, but his work seems largely to elicit pettifogging mis or un-readings. I can honor his apparently principled resistance to reduce what he apprehends just so that he could support some ideology, even as I am in sympathy with Alex's point that the life seems largely unhinged from the work. Although this last is a very large point - one that embraces us all in our openness and confusion.

I am disappointed to see that you consider me to have a thought-out resistance to Derrida's celebrity, as I 've always prided myself on my general snarkyness :)

Let's file this one away under 'things to resolve in the meatworld'.

When compared to the Stack, the Heap is a simple thing to understand. All the memory that's left over is "in the Heap" (excepting some special cases and some reserve). There is little structure, but in return for this freedom of movement you must create and destroy any boundaries you need. And it is always possible that the heap might simply not have enough space for you.

When Batman went home at the end of a night spent fighting crime, he put on a suit and tie and became Bruce Wayne. When Clark Kent saw a news story getting too hot, a phone booth hid his change into Superman. When you're programming, all the variables you juggle around are doing similar tricks as they present one face to you and a totally different one to the machine.

Seth Roby graduated in May of 2003 with a double major in English and Computer Science, the Macintosh part of a three-person Macintosh, Linux, and Windows graduating triumvirate.