A discussion about postmodernism (part 6)

(Continued ...)

Interlocutor:

I'm glad you picked up on the irony of my pedantically explaining Venn diagrams to a logician!

Blosser:

Don't get too ironic on my: I'm quite dull, y'know.

Interlocutor:

I agree with you in being skeptical of the ultimate value of these images, metaphors, etc. Venn diagrams are just Venn diagrams, and Lewis's hall-way metaphor is just a hall-way metaphor--what we're using them to talk about is something other, of course. I like Lewis's metaphor a lot--I hadn't known of it before. It better expresses what it feels like to be, or try to be, a religious person--I can relate to his reluctance to camp out in a hall-way somewhere.

Blosser:

My view of Lewis has changed over the years. Now I think he's really under-rated. I've learned a lot from him. He's very unoriginal, but helpful and putting very traditional ideas in often profound and accessible ways.

Interlocutor:

I feel as if we've reached what is for me a familiar impasse. You seem to be granting that there is what I have called the "violence" (and you have called ""violence"") of naming but denying that there is any way to avoid it. That is precisely the question, for me--is there? I think we leap too hastilly into the mode of making virtue of necessity, putting "violence" in quotation marks, etc. There is no other way if you assume there isn't. I understand the point--I have on a couple of occasions seen one of our own resident chemists fume and gesticulate and say, if there's one thing I hate, it's those damn Norwegians telling ME what it means to be Lutheran. It's amusing, of course, and also of course, I see his point. He's responding to the violence of naming with exasperation, as we all do. But I don't think saying that it's inevitable is either helpful or necessarily true--that would have to be shown. If it were true, we would be condemned to take all names and concepts as provisional and relative, and while most of us are so calloused that we take that cognitive hell for granted in our fallen world, I'm not sure it really is so. Accepting that everything is relative is one option. Tying everything back to the bedrock of Agios Petros is another. But there's a third, I think. At least, [Jacques] Derrida presents deconstruction as a viable third way.

Blosser:

All of this depends on how we define "violence," of course. At one end, there are some forms of labeling and categorizing that can involve genuine violence against another, and I want to avoid that. At the other end, there are things that are called "violence" that simply aren't, in my opinion. Take all those crosses for the aborted unborn put up around my church. I helped the Knights of Columbus put them up and paint them this past weekend. One of them told me he was in McGuires one Friday when a woman found out he was from St. Al's -- the church with "all those crosses" around it, and she hit the roof, turning beet red, and calling this the most "violent, hateful expression of discrimination" she had ever encountered. It turned out, as you might have suspected, that she had had two abortions and was probably feeling fairly conflicted about this. But where's the "violence" in this situation? On the part of a church that puts up crosses as reminders that we are killing 4000 human unborn every DAY in the US? Where is the violence?

Interlocutor:

It seems very ironic to me that deconstruction has been taken consistently as an act of violence, because Derrida has been quite plain from the beginning about it's not being such at all. People talk about the deconstruction of the self, and other people think there's this cherished notion of a coherent, unified self, and Derrida is ripping it to pieces, but that's just silly. It's really hard to find a philosopher who has not somehow complicted the notion of the self, and Derrida, re: the self and everything else, is always just saying things others have said before. Derrida says in "Demeur," "The self itself. Is there a witness who would dare say this? And yet is there a witness who must not say this, in all conscience, namely: 'At the moment of my attestation I am no longer the same as the witness who lived that and who remains irreplacable?'" (65). Which is a lot like the first paragraph of A Sickness Unto Death--it's not to be taken as an attempt at originality. But Derrida generalizes the phenomenon and names it. To meditate on the self is to become more and more aware of its constant stuctural disintegration, which is not just to say we're all dust in the wind (I used to could play that on a tennis racket, but never learned it on guitar). What he shows, time after time, is that everything deconstructs--all names, all concepts, all words, all things. We experience the deconstruction of the self, presumably, in a moment, so then he deconstructs "moment." At first, we may predict that the result of this awareness would send us off screaming and wailing into the night, but that never happens, in my experience. What happens is that people are struck by a sense that they are reading more closely and understanding more deeply than they ever have before. Rather than deconstruction being a violence that separates, it is instead a pattern that binds. It's not a theory that one applies to a text but something one suddenly starts seeing and reading in texts. (I realize I may have lost you miles back in this paragraph, but you'll tell me.) A reading and thinking based on the consistency of radical, structural difference cannot exclude anyone from anything, which cannot be said of the more conventional academic mode of category manipulation. And gone in deconstruction are the hypothetical, provisional nature of discourse that we're all used to taking for granted--all reading and thinking are immediate. In other words, we never have to say, with deconstruction, "we all know the term 'Christian' means something different to everyone, but for the same of argument, let's define it, provisionally, thus: ____________ ." What we do in deconstruction, instead, is read, reading texts and all their concepts and structures against themselves, in all their proliferating plurality, to see what emerges. I want to argue that all of this can be done without the voilence of naming, the violence that George feels when Norwegians talk about Lutheranism, and I feel when you talk about postmodernists, etc. It just seems to me a mode of discourse that is both more decent and polite and also more rigorous, since it doesn't involve manipulating categories we know are provisional at best and saying that the violence, since it is necessary, must be made a virtue of. Certainly, category manipulation is a valuable skill, one I'm practicing as I write this, perhaps without much subtlety, and one that we can be trained to do artfully rather than stupidly. But I don't think it's defacto the only way to think about things, and so I don't think its violence is inevitable.

Blosser:

First, when you state that deconstruction isn't violent or destructive, you touch on something we've addressed before. While I don't doubt the benign motives of some who engage in deconstruction (I know I sometimes do), I think the case remains to be made as to the overall impact of what has spiraled into a movement under that label (and there I'd doubt you'd disagree with me too strongly).

Second, when you say that Derrida has done nothing really that radically new in deconstructing the notion of the "self," you're right. Others before him have done so no less profoundly-- and I'm not only thinking of the skeptical Hume but Christian medieval thinkers who accept the notion of the soul while delighting in its mystifying elusiveness from a phenomenal point of view. I think I've acknowledged before in correspondence with you that Derrida, when read in one way, is really very unoriginal: he simply states more succinctly and artfully than many others have the implicit critique of finitude and temporality that the post-Cartesian Enlightenment project (especially) calls down upon itself. In other ways, though, I think he's remarkably original; but not in this respect.

Third, I would like to hear you play "Dust in the Wind" on your tennis racket sometime.

Fourth, when you say that awareness of the deconstrutive effects on our understanding of the self haven't usually sent us off screaming into the night, but have heightened our awareness of reading more closely and understanding more deeply, I have no doubt you are right -- so far as some readers are concerned. But different people understand and react to things in different ways. The first reports of the death of God brought expressions of relief and exhilaration among Enlightenment intellectuals. Nietzsche is sometimes read this way, which I think is mistaken: "Alas, grand me madness," he cries, rather, "for by being above the Law I am the most outcast of outcasts." Etc. And certainly Sartre scorns those who are too giddy over the prospect, finding it "embarrassing" that there is no God, because with His death comes the death of grounding any ethics in a "heaven of values." Etc. Perhaps you would dismiss as "sophomoric" the reaction of some you have encountered to Derrida and deconstruction. In any case, I think you may agree with me that reactions have not been uniform; and the reasons for that, in my view, are well worth exploring.

Fifth, I am sorry you feel "violence" in the way I talk about postmodernism. I don't suppose either of us would feel too badly about the "violence" a southern white racist felt about our way of describing neo-Nazi attitudes. The point, of course, isn't that you're a "white racist," but that I think I find a lack of intellectual integrity and rigour in certain writers (I'm not thinking here of Derrida or yourself) I can't find any way of classifying other than "post-modernist." The apparent strenght of these writers is their weakness; their weakness their strength. They capitalize on the inability of their opponents to achieve Cartesian certitude about their first principles, then leave the sophomores thinking that there are no certainties to be found. Richard Rorty, for example, left the Philosophy Dept. at Princeton because he concluded that truth is all fiction anyway, having defined "truth" as: "whatever your peers let you get away with saying." On the one hand, this appears "strong": Cartesian apodicticity is an impossible ideal for finite human beings. I don't know who wouldn't grant that. But this "strength" is the flip side of a weakness: it leaves the sophomoric hordes assuming that there is no truth or reality to be had at all, which is simply silly, as Plato proves countless times in his dialogues. I return to the crosses around St. Aloysius Church: I have no doubt that those exist who feel "violated" by that silent witness to the truth of what is occurring daily in this culture of death, but do these silent crosses in fact DO VIOLENCE to anyone? Aren't those who kill babies to the tune of 4000 a day in the U.S. alone involved in doing violence a bit more directly than those who have erected those crosses?

Sixth, you link doing violence with what you call "category manipulation." You admit: "Certainly, category manipulation is a valuable skill, one I'm practicing as I write this, perhaps without much subtlety, and one that we can be trained to do artfully rather than stupidly. But I don't think it's defacto the only way to think about things, and so I don't think its violence is inevitable." So then how would you avoid the violence of category manipulation if you think there are other ways of thinking about things? Would you stop short of ding ehskl slk'je- kjsl bl, whiek skljdk schleissnich tsiasll ? If words are to mean anything, isn't "category manipulation" not only unavoidable, but a great gift? Granted, there is a flexible semantic range of meaning that words convey. "Postmodernist" or "Christian" or "Lutheran" can mean a number of very different, sometimes even contradictory, things. But doesn't meaningful communication require us to try our best to say what we mean and mean what we say? Is there anything between that an jabberwocky?

Interlocutor:

Also, you say,

I appreciate the spirit and disposition of your statements here, I think; and I think anyone in or out of the academy ought to be about increasing his understanding, deepening his faith, and so on. No problem there. But I don't see how your second option avoids the denotatively self-eviscertating quality of "courtesy meanings" such as attach connotatively to "gentlemen" (as in "Gentlemen's club") or "ladies" (as in "Ladies' Room") or "Christian" (as in "good white English-speakin' Christian folk"). Doesn't it make far more (un-laughable) sense to talk about "Christianity" as denoting a set of propositions that anyone can adhere to regardless of the color of their skin, ethnicity, etc.? I'm against malicious name-calling as much as the next fellow, but what use are names at all unless they mean something?

I appreciate this--certainly, propositions do have the value of (potentiall, at least) crossing color lines, etc. (whether they do so in fact is another question). I didn't intend to say that my second option "avoids" the denotatively self-eviscertating quality of "courtesy meanings," exactly (unless I DID say it, which would be a different story), but rather that such "denotatively self-eviscertating" terms need not be said always to be used trivially. If Lutherans and Quakers work together in "Christian" collaboration to build a Habitat house, the term "Christian may be "denotatively self-eviscertating," since it might well turn out that the two groups could not agree on the truth and interpretation of a single proposition. Still, however, the house would get built, and both would think of the building of it as a Christian act, but in its furthering of the commandments to love thy neighbor, care for the poor, etc., and in its furthering of Christian unity. The term "Christian" might thus be an entirely unphilosophical term, and if it were used naively as if it were a philosophical term, it could easily become an offensive one. (If "Christian" means you should care for the poor, then "Christian" probably means "Muslim," a term that Muslims would perhaps understandably prefer, and they might expect us to recognize that.) But you know, the Lutherans, who are used to thinking of themselves as "Christian," would probably use the term with greater fondness and personal meaning after the experience, etc. Unphilosophical, but untrivial.

Blosser:

Quakers and Lutherans working together on building a Habitat house is a good example; and what you go on to describe, I think, underlines those areas where their mutual understanding of the term "Christian" and its call to love neighbor, etc., coincide. The fact that there would be differences of theological definition further down doesn't mean that there isn't agreement of theological definition further up. Lutherans and Quakers could probably even agree without disagreement in calling their joint effort a "Christian" project. But what do you do when Quakers join Lutherans for the explicit purpose of thinking through the requirements of Christ duiring wartime in light of their respective traditions, and George Fox is an amicable pacifist and Luther is a pugnacious hot head who counsels the German princes in his tract, Against the Murderous Thieving Hordes of Peasants, to "stab, smite, and slay the rebels" in the uprisings of the German peasants (who were by and large simple anabaptist folk)? While most Lutherans today would doubtless condemn Luther's attitude, they still have a hawkish tradition that would be very much at odds with that of the Quakers. How do Christians with different understanding of what it means to be "Christian" proceed? Probably no differently than professors with different understanding of what it means to be "postmodernist" proceed: by discussing and arguing, hopefully with charity and respect for one another. I don't see how "Quaker" can be made out to mean "Lutheran" any more than "Christian" can be made out to be "Muslim," though the latter two might be able to agree that their agreement at some point had to do with their being mutually "children of Abraham" in one sense or another.