Wednesday, April 30, 2008

Deconstruction, Dirty Harry and French Theory

From: French Theory in America

" ... It's all an act, a confected fable, but so is Dirty Harry; so is everything. If deconstruction was something that an American male icon performed, there was no reason to fear it; truth, reason and the American way were safe.

It turned out, of course, that my conclusion was hasty and premature, for it was in the early '90s that the culture wars went into high gear and the chief target of the neo-conservative side was this theory that I thought had run its course. It became clear that it had a second life, or a second run, as the villain of a cultural melodrama produced and starred in by Allan Bloom, Dinesh D'Souza, Roger Kimball and other denizens of the right, even as its influence was declining in the academic precincts this crew relentlessly attacked.

It's a great story, full of twists and turns, and now it has been told in extraordinary detail in a book to be published next month: "French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States" (University of Minnesota Press).

The book's author is Francois Cusset, who sets himself the tasks of explaining, first, what all the fuss was about, second, why the specter of French theory made strong men tremble, and third, why there was never really anything to worry about.

Certainly mainstream or centrist intellectuals thought there was a lot to worry about. They agreed with Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, who complained that the ideas coming out of France amounted to a "rejection of the rationalist tradition of the Enlightenment" even to the point of regarding "science as nothing more than a 'narration' or a 'myth' or a social construction among many others."

This is not quite right; what was involved was less the rejection of the rationalist tradition than an interrogation of its key components: an independent, free-standing, knowing subject, the "I" facing an independent, free-standing world. The problem was how to get the "I" and the world together, how to bridge the gap that separated them ever since the older picture of a universe everywhere filled with the meanings God originates and guarantees had ceased to be compelling to many.

The solution to the problem in the rationalist tradition was to extend man's reasoning powers in order to produce finer and finer descriptions of the natural world, descriptions whose precision could be enhanced by technological innovations (telescopes, microscopes, atom smashers, computers) that were themselves extensions of man's rational capacities. The vision was one of a steady progress with the final result to be a complete and accurate — down to the last detail — account of natural processes. Francis Bacon, often thought of as the originator of the project , believed in the early 17th century that it could be done in six generations.

It was Bacon who saw early on that the danger to the project was located in its middle term — the descriptions and experiments that were to be a window on the reality they were trying to capture. The trouble, Bacon explained, is that everything, even the framing of experiments, begins with language, with words; and words have a fatal tendency to substitute themselves for the facts they are supposed merely to report or reflect. While men "believe that their reason governs words," in fact "words react on the understanding"; that is, they shape rather than serve rationality. Even precise definitions, Bacon lamented, don't help because "the definitions themselves consist of words, and those words beget others" and as the sequence of hypotheses and calculations extends itself, the investigator is carried not closer to but ever further way from the independent object he had set out to apprehend.

In Bacon's mind the danger of words going off on their own unconstrained-by-the-world way was but one example of the deficiencies we have inherited from the sin of Adam and Eve. In men's love of their own words (and therefore of themselves), he saw the effects "of that venom which the serpent infused…and which makes the mind of man to swell." As an antidote he proposed his famous method of induction which mandates very slow, small, experimental steps; no proposition is to be accepted until it has survived the test of negative examples brought in to invalidate it.

In this way, Bacon hopes, the "entire work of the understanding" will be "commenced afresh" and with better prospects of success because the mind will be "not left to take its own course, but guided at every step, and the business done as if by machinery." The mind will be protected from its own inclination to err and "swell," and the tools the mind inevitably employs, the tools of representation — words, propositions, predications, measures, symbols (including the symbols of mathematics) — will be reined in and made serviceable to and subservient to a prior realm of unmediated fact.

To this hope, French theory (and much thought that precedes it) says "forget about it"; not because no methodological cautions could be sufficient to the task, but because the distinctions that define the task — the "I," the world, and the forms of description or signification that will be used to join them — are not independent of one another in a way that would make the task conceivable, never mind doable. ... "

Equally delightful: French Theory in America, Part Two

 

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