Derrida de-obfuscated

 

Some people think that deconstruction is just a fad, a fashion popular in the eighties that has fallen out of favour in recent years. Not so! Deconstruction is a philosophical methodology that will never die. Like an octopus, it has infiltrated its tentacles into every field, to the point that the term has lost its original meaning. ‘Deconstruction’ is not what the mechanic is doing when he takes your Nissan Primera apart looking for the source of that mysterious rattle; it is, rather, a proper, technical term employed by philosophers, literature scholars and other gurus to astonish and impress their devotees. So, for all those who missed this particular post-modern bus when it drove through town, I shall briefly elucidate what the term ‘deconstruction’ really stands for. (A post-modern bus, by the way, is just a regular bus that has been preserved in formaldehyde and exhibited in the Tate).

To begin, we must ask: what is language? ‘Language’, to paraphrase Derrida, is a collection of heterogenous, imbricated elements and practices completely lacking in interiority or, for that matter, any connection with ‘the real world’. I believe it was Dorothy Parker who said that language is “a virus from outer space”. A ‘text’, by contrast, is a space in which ‘language’ vies with itself, exhibiting to the world the tensions and internal contradictions that, on the one hand, inhibit it and, on the other, provide grounds for its existence, much like a reluctant cross-dresser. Texts are always saying the opposite of what they really want to say. (This is, incidentally, part of the reason why train timetables are so unreliable.)

Language is organised principally through binary oppositions. The opposed members form a hegemonic hierarchy. The text in making an assertion, excludes all the other contradictory assertions that -ironically- form the substratum on which the primary assertion is built. Deconstruction consists in demonstrating that the text is necessarily ‘impure’ and in tracking down all the other, subaltern meanings.

An example will help clarify things. The polar opposite of the term ‘plutonium’ is ‘mashed potatoes’. Mashed potatoes are ‘Present’- you eat them every Sunday when you visit you grandmother. However, ‘plutonium’ is a subject never touched upon in conversation around the dining room table. This is ironic because plutonium is the life-blood of the Military Industrial Complex, which gauruntees the security of this gathering. We all live in the shadow of the Atomic Age.

An author Derrida himself cites is Rousseau, who, in his Confessions, admitted an unhealthy obsession with mashed potatoes:

“by adroit usage of a knife and fork, I can shape the potatoes into a semblance of the Alps, or else the Pyrenees, or else, by dribbling gravy into a hollow, of the placid Mediterranean, or anywhere. With only a plate of mashed potatoes, I have the entire world spread before me!”

Rousseau’s obsession with mashed potato dominated his life to such an extent that he began neglecting the meat and vegetables that had been formerly a central theme in his meals. This Derrida terms the Logic of the Dietary Supplement: the foodstuff that comes to supplant the meal of which it was originally only a part.

For the sake of the completeness, I should remark that according to the paradigmatic episteme in which Rousseau operated, the polar opposite of ‘mashed potato’ was not ‘plutonium’ but ‘dissipation’.

I hope this has left you a little wiser.

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In a previous posting, I described David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest as ‘self-indulgent’. I have since been suffering the agonies of the damned, not so much because I criticised a book listed as one of Time’s 100 Great Novels of the Century, but because I wrote it offwith a single word. At the time of the posting, I could not quite remember what my problem was with it.

I’ve since remembered. At the beginning of any novel, or film for that matter, there is a certain amount of business that sets up the characters and the setting. At some point however the story starts. The problem with Infinite Jest however is the reader keeps waiting and waiting for the narrative proper to begin, but it never does. The whole thing is introductory business. Infinite Jest is really a shaggy dog story, and this is probably the key to its title.