Of course you don’t believe a word of all that. I propose, therefore, to work through an interesting example: deconstruction, the philosophy, if philosophy it is, associated with Jacques Derrida, the last of the soixante-huitards to have brought his box of tricks to the Anglo-American university. In America deconstruction has been closely associated with the culture of repudiation, with feminism, and with a concerted attempt to politicise the curriculum – usually in the belief that the curriculum is already politicised, though in the wrong direction. In confronting the deconstructionist, therefore, you are not engaged in a neutral enquiry. Indeed, your opponent will say, the belief in neutral enquiries is not a neutral belief: it is the expression of a conservative worldview, the very worldview that is most in need of deconstruction.
There is no reasoned attack that does not implicitly assume what deconstruction ‘puts in question’ – namely, the possibility of a reasoned attack. In arguing with you, I assume that my words mean something, and that their meaning is accessible to you. I assume that I can refer to objects of common knowledge, and that you can grasp my reference and so situate me in the world that you too inhabit. I assume the possibility of speaking truly, and of arguing from truth to truth, so as to carry you along with me to a common conclusion. But if these assumptions are untenable, then argument is futile. Moreover, by a curious inversion, my very disposition to argue jeopardises argument. That which must be assumed in every argument cannot be justified by argument. By pointing this out, the deconstructionist subverts my discourse, and leaves me speechless, conscious only of his cavernous laughter as he retires victorious into the void.
I shall therefore set deconstruction within its cultural and political context, and try to understand its underlying agenda. My interest is neither philosophical nor anthropological but theological. For the ambitions of deconstruction can be fully comprehended, I believe, in no other way.
Deconstructive writing refrains from stating anything directly or assertorically. It quickly withdraws from any proposition that it sets before us, and spirals off into questions -questions which are themselves so factitious and self-referential as to deny a foothold to the sceptical outsider. Here is Derrida’s response to the question whether his writings are to be judged as literature or as philosophy:
I will say that my texts belong neither to the “philosophical” register nor to the “literary” register. Thereby they communicate, or so I hope at least, with other texts that, having operated a certain rupture, can be called “philosophical” or “literary” only according to a kind of paleonomy: the question of paleonomy: what is the strategic necessity (and why do we still call strategic an operation that in the last analysis refuses to be governed by a teleo-eschatalogical horizon? Up to what point is this refusal possible and how does it negotiate its effects? Why must it negotiate these effects, including the effect of this why itself? Why does strategy refer to the play of the stratagem rather than to the hierarchical organisation of the means and the ends? etc. These questions will not be quickly reduced.), what, then, is the “strategic” necessity that requires the occasional maintenance of an old name in order to launch a new concept?49
This is not an answer, but a series of fabricated ‘meta-questions’, which dance about the original question until its meaning has slipped away. If I were to describe what is really going on in such passages, I would say that their principal movement is one of ‘taking back’: each passage cancels in its second half what is promised in the first. Whatever enters the text enters by association rather than statement, so that no commitment is truly voiced. And once an idea has entered it drifts at once into its negation, so that the brief promise of a statement remains unfulfilled.
There are those who dismiss the result as pretentious gobble-degook, which refrains from meaning anything largely because the author has nothing to mean. And there are those who are mesmerised by it, awe-struck by its majestic vacuity, and convinced that it contains (or at least conceals) the mystery of the written word. Strangely enough readers of this second class often agree with those of the first, that the author refrains from meaning anything, and indeed that he has nothing to mean. But they regard this as a great achievement – a liberation of language from the shackles of a dictated meaning, by showing that meaning, in its traditional construction, is in a deep sense impossible.
Neither of those attitudes is exactly right. It is not right to dismiss this jargon-infested delirium as meaningless; nor is it right to welcome it as the proof that nothing can be meant. For it does mean something – namely Nothing. It is an exercise in meaning Nothing, in presenting Nothing as something that can and should be meant, and as the true meaning of every text. And that is its meaning.
Hence the deconstructive critic will not engage in philosophical argument. Deconstruction, Derrida tells us, ‘determines – from a certain exterior that is unqualifiable or unnameable by philosophy – what [philosophy’s] history has been able to dissimulate or forbid’.50 In other words, it goes behind philosophy, which is left speechless in the face of that which it had wished to hide. The victory over philosophy comes when we show that philosophical argument is, in the end, dependent on metaphor, and that ‘metaphor … always carries its death within itself. And this death,’ Derrida adds, ‘is also the death of philosophy’51 – the point being that philosophy has no authority, until founded in some literal truth. Derrida is aiming for a radical ‘reversal’ of our ‘Western tradition’, and of the belief in reason that has guided it. Likewise he proposes a ‘new concept of writing, that simultaneously provokes the overturning of the hierarchy speech/writing, and the entire system attached to it’52 – the system in question being the intellectual tradition of which Derrida is the final and finalising product.
In other words, that there is no vantage-point from which deconstruction can be judged. If there were such a vantage-point, it would be philosophy; but philosophy has been deconstructed. Deconstruction is therefore self-vindicating, and provides the culture of repudiation with its spiritual credentials, the proof that it is ‘not of this world’ and comes in judgement upon it. Of course, the subversive intention in no way forbids deconstruction from becoming an orthodoxy, the pillar of a new establishment, and the badge of conformity that the literary apparatchik now must wear. But in this it is no different from other subversive doctrines: Marxism, for example, Leninism and Maoism. Just as pop is rapidly becoming the official culture of the post-modern State, so is the culture of repudiation becoming the official culture of the post-modern university.
Intimately connected to this posture is the belief that the human world is a human construct. To know reality is to know it through signs, and signs are our invention. If at times we have the impression that we compare our thought with the world, that we measure our utterances, against the standard of some absolute reality, then this is no more than a comforting illusion, engendered by our complacent posture within language, and our inability to transcend language to the point where its limitations can be grasped. Thought can be compared only with thought, and the category of reality is no more than one among the many products of the intellect, a frame through which the ceaseless flow of experience is viewed. When we appear to shift from thinking to the world, in fact we shift from frame to frame.
If the human world is a construct, if the categories through which we understand reality are all that there is, while being also our creation, then it is open to us to un-create and re-create the world: and this will be our recreation. The existing construct enshrines and legitimates the prevailing system of power. To deconstruct it is a work of liberation, a vindication of the intellectual against his bourgeois enemy, and an ‘empowering’ of the oppressed. We should jettison the ruling concepts – including the concept of objectivity – and expose the oppressor whose mask they are.
I do not say that the argument has any force. Indeed it is an argument that subverts itself, like the paradox of the liar. For suppose that the argument is right. It follows that there is a distinction between right and wrong, valid and invalid, acceptable and erroneous. In which case the argument (which tells us that all such distinctions are ultimately senseless) is wrong. Nevertheless, those who pin their flag to this mast will seldom be troubled by the worm of logic, even if it has eaten the mast away. Paradox is just another subversive force; and if my own position too is destroyed by it, that leaves me all the more free to enjoy it, secure in the belief that no argument can be levelled against me, since no argument can be levelled at all.
Even if the style of Derrida and his more garrulous disciples is such as deliberately to withdraw from doctrine, making assertions, if at all, only instantly to negate them, so that the reader must either refuse to enter the labyrinth or else become entirely captive to it, there are nevertheless ideas which you are invited to register and to make your own.
The first of these is the thesis of the ‘logocentric’ (or ‘phonocentric’) nature of Western culture. Our culture, it is argued, has privileged speech over writing, regarding the spoken word as containing a truth and a reality that are irretrievably dispersed when the word is written down. Speech provides the standard to which writing must return for its credentials. This is because the self is present in the spoken word while, as every literary critic knows, it vanishes when the word is written. Hence arises a profound suspicion of the written word, which abolishes the ‘self-presence’ that we encounter (or imagine) in the spoken word, and substitutes an absence in its stead.
From time to time, it is true, our culture has been suspicious of the written word, and there are circumstances in which (as is only rational) it has granted privileges to speech that it does not grant to writing. But western civilisation is founded upon the written record, and its core religions – Judaism and Christianity – are, like their close cousin, Islam, religions of the book, in which Latin, Greek and Ancient Hebrew have achieved the sacred status of the voice of God, precisely through being written down: a fact that enabled them to retain their importance long after they ceased to be spoken. Our religious ceremonies involve readings, and our priests have also been scribes. Our worldview descends from a common culture founded on a sacred text. The other great cornerstone of our civilisation – the secular law – has made writing into an essential prerequisite for all important transactions, precisely because writing is a permanent sign of human intentions. And while the point of writing something down is often to guarantee the spoken performance, this lies in the nature of things. A parallel should be drawn with music – the greatest achievement of our high culture, and one that would have been impossible had composers not discovered that music could be written down, and a symphony of tones transcribed into a page of symbols.
The thesis of ‘logocentrism’ – that our civilisation has exalted the spoken word above all other signs – is therefore false. But this in no way deters Derrida’s disciples from accepting it unquestioningly, frequently asserting it with a dogmatic conviction that closes the door to argument.53 What appeals in the thesis is not its historical truth, but the magic light that it casts on the written text, which becomes not merely a denial of ‘self-presence’, but the record of an absence: an impenetrable veil drawn across the human soul, through which the reality of another life cannot be authentically encountered. The content of the text is now derived solely from our reading of it: the author vanishes, becomes absent; and his absence is, so to speak, read into the text, which is no more a revelation of his soul than are his discarded nail clippings. The result is an idolisation of the ‘text’, which can be felt in the use of that peculiar ‘reifying’ word to describe every work of art or philosophy, every durable ‘sign’.
This idolisation is reinforced by the theory of ‘différance’ – a word whose inaudible misspelling insinuates that its identity as written cannot be captured in speech. In his Cours de linguistique générate, Ferdinand de Saussure had argued that the meaning of a sign attaches to it only in the context of other signs that might meaningfully replace it in a sentence. It is not the sound of the word ‘hot’ that confers its meaning, nor any other of its intrinsic characteristics. It is the fact that it comes into play through a contrast with ‘cold’. The meaning of ‘hot’ resides at least partly in the ‘difference’ between ‘hot’ and ‘cold’. (And also, presumably, the difference between hot and cold.) Saussure, Derrida assumes, is saying that language is nothing but a system of differences, each sign owing its meaning to the signs that it excludes. Language has no ‘positive terms’, but is an endless string of negations, whose meaning lies in what is not said, and what cannot be said (for to say it is merely to defer the meaning to another hidden negative). No sign means in isolation, and meaning waits upon the ‘other’ sign, the sign that completes it by opposing it, but which cannot be finally written down. Meaning, in other words, is never present, but always deferred, and at no point is the process of deferral (différence) exhausted. Meaning is chased through the text from sign to sign, always vanishing as we seem to reach it; and if we stop at a particular place, saying now we have it, now the meaning lies before us, then this is our decision, which may have a political justification, but which is in no way dictated by the text. Thus the ambiguous noun ‘différence’ must be taken here in both its senses – as difference and deferral: and this too is recorded in that mysterious misspelling.
The effect of such cryptic ideas is to introduce not a critical reading of a text, but a series of spells, by which meaning is first imprisoned, and then extinguished. The goal is to deconstruct what the author has constructed, to read the ‘text’ against itself, by showing that the endeavour to mean one thing generates the opposite reading. The ‘text’ subverts itself before our eyes, meaning anything and therefore nothing. Whether the result is a ‘free play of meanings’, whether we can say, with some of Derrida’s disciples, that every interpretation is a misinterpretation, are matters that are hotly and comically disputed in the camp of deconstruction. But for our purpose, these disputes can be set aside. What matters is the source of the ‘will to believe’ that leads people to adhere so frantically to these doctrines that cannot survive translation from the peculiar language which announces them.
Deconstruction is neither a method nor an argument. It should be understood on the model of magic incantation. Incantations are not arguments, and avoid completed thoughts and finished sentences. They depend on crucial terms, which derive their effect from repetition, and from their appearance in long lists of cryptic syllables. Their purpose is not to describe what is there, but to summon what is not there: to charm the god into the idol, so as to reveal himself in the here and now. Incantations can do their work only if key words and phrases acquire a mystical penumbra. The meaning of these symbols stretches deep in another dimension, and can never be coaxed into a plain statement.
Incantations resist the definition of their terms. Their purpose is not to reveal the mystery but to preserve it – to enfold it (as Derrida might say) within the sacred symbol, within the ‘sign’. The sacred word is not defined, but inserted into a mystical ballet. The aim is not to acquire a meaning, but to ensure that the question of meaning is gradually forgotten and the word itself, in all its mesmerising nothingness, occupies the foreground of our attention. Here, for instance, is Derrida’s explanation of the claim that reference to a present reality is always ‘deferred’:
Deferred by virtue of the very principle of différance which holds that an element functions and signifies, takes on or conveys meaning, only by referring to another past or future element in an economy of traces. This economic aspect of différance, which brings into play a certain not conscious calculation in a field of forces, is inseparable from the more narrowly semiotic aspect of différance. It confirms that the subject, and first of all the conscious and speaking subject, depends upon the system of differences and the movement of différance, that the subject is not present, nor above all present to itself before différance, that the subject is constituted only in being divided from itself, in becoming space, in temporizing, in deferral …54
The passage adds precisely nothing to that which it purports to explain – namely, the alleged fact that reference to a present reality is always ‘deferred’. On the contrary, it merely repeats the idea, in ever larger circles of self-referring and self-deferring rhetoric, with a liturgical return to the crucial words: defer, difference, différance. The expectation seems to be that the reader will be induced to accept these terms as containing a meaning too vast to be transcribed in other words: a meaning that is essentially secret, like the meaning of a spell. Other key terms and phrases are subjected to this process: ‘supplement’, ‘absence’, ‘alterity’, ‘mark’, and the ‘always already’ which indicates that nature, reality and being can never be captured, since the impossibility of capturing them is ‘always already’ assumed in the attempt to do so.
Incantation of this kind is familiar from the religious context, and forms part of a complex social relation. In order to understand its significance, we need to supply the other four terms of the relation, namely: the idol before whom the spell is chanted; the priest who is authorised to repeat it; the deity who is summoned by it and who occupies his place within the idol; and the congregation whose membership is sealed by the sacred presence. Such we learn from the anthropologists, and their insights enable us, I believe, to understand some part of what is going on in the strange world of deconstruction. For it is evident that the ‘text’ is treated idolatrously by Derrida: it is lifted out of the everyday world, and endowed with a more than natural potency, a potency so great that all of reality is finally absorbed into it. It is no longer the expression of a human soul, nor in any real sense a human product, but a visitor from another realm, into which the spirit must be conjured. It is also evident that the deconstructionist critic assumes a hierophantic posture – he is the guardian and oracle of the text’s sacred meaning, the unquestioned and unquestionable master of ceremonies, who displays the kind of inside knowledge, the privileged access to a secret, which the congregation must approach through him. And it is reasonable to see his readers (those to whom his words are covertly addressed) as a congregation, united by initiation and membership rather than by rational enquiry. (The ‘deconstructive community’ is the very opposite of the ‘scientific community’, in just this respect: that it is a community.)
We should therefore recognise the proximity of the deconstructionist milieu to the religious experience, as I invoked it in the Chapter 2. The crucial terms are liturgical, and owe their effect to repetition: to repeat them is to display a badge of membership, and to scorn or question them is to risk anathema. The normal response of those who advocate deconstruction to those who question it is not to reply with argument, but to rule both the question and the questioner out of court.55 The critic reveals through his criticism that he is excluded from the fold. He is not one of us. His very disposition to argue shows his failure to understand the revelation that makes argument futile. The revelation ‘transports us to a higher plane’, where the infidel is deconstructed, and his assumptions deferred.
The god of deconstruction is not a ‘real presence’, in the Christian sense, but an absence: a negativity. The revelation of the god is a revelation, so to speak, of a transcendental emptiness, an unmeaning, where meaning should have been. Derrida is quite explicit about this (insofar as he is explicit about anything). ‘Grammatology’, as he originally described his gospel, announces ‘the “thought-that-means-nothing”, “the thought that exceeds meaning’”,56 and he elaborates the point in the following way:
“Thought” (quotation marks: the word “thought” and what is called “thought”) means nothing: it is the substantified void of a highly derivative ideality, the effect of a différance of forces. …57
A ‘substantified void’ is the Real Presence of Nothing: and this is the content of this strange religion.
Looking back over the points that I have emphasised, we can discern an underlying vision of the world that is being promoted in the form of this Real Presence, which is also an ‘absence’. I do not say that Derrida himself would endorse this vision. Nor should we expect this, if my hypothesis is correct. The founder of a religion must never be entirely lucid or unambiguous; like Jesus or Muhammad, he must say a great many seemingly contradictory things. The gospel should become clear only in retrospect, when shaped by the requirements of a particular community, whose eager partisanship will be the proof of God’s approval. However, it seems to me that deconstruction has become clear in retrospect. Those who have endorsed its claims seem also to belong to a particular congregation of latter-day malcontents: an imagined community of the dispossessed. De-construction has been adopted as a weapon against the ‘hegemonic’ and ‘authoritarian’ structures of the traditional culture; and it has entered the culture of repudiation as its final and clinching idea. The one thing that the deconstructionist cannot do is to endorse the powers that be, uphold Western civilisation, affirm the values of bourgeois society, or betray the ordinary conservative instincts that make the world go round – as opposed to those ‘destabilising’ and ‘unsettling’ postures which cause it to fly off at a tangent. The unspoken unity around this agenda explains the disarray that followed the revelation that one of the leading ecclesiastics (Paul de Man) had once had Nazi sympathies. It is manifestly absurd to suggest that a similar disarray would have attended the discovery that he had once been a communist – even if he had taken part in the great communist crimes. In such a case he would have enjoyed the same compassionate endorsement as was afforded to Lukács, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. On the other hand, from the credal perspective – the perspective that examines credentials – the similarities between communism and Nazism are far more significant than the differences.
If the facts bear the interpretation that I find irresistible, then they offer a clear picture of the deconstructionist theology. Here it is:
(1) There is no legitimacy or authority in the world, but only human constructs, whose foundation is power.
(2) There is no truth, but only ‘truth’ in inverted commas: a concept that is ripe for deconstruction. All attempts to know the truth merely presuppose that we know it: and the proof that our attempt is futile is ‘always already’ there.
(3) There is no ‘transcendental creator’, nothing that produces what we perceive (the ‘text’) apart from those who read it. At the same time, whatever we create is also an un-creation, an absence. To know it is to deconstruct it, to show that the result of creation is also destruction. In effect, the world in which we find ourselves is an ‘uncreated’ world.
(4) In particular, there is no meaning. To attempt to mean something is to embark on an infinite trajectory which can never arrest itself in sense. If meaning were to exist, it would exist in the text – the idol. But we can summon into this idol nothing, apart from Nothing itself. The world is haunted by absence, by the Nothingness of Sartre and Heidegger: the notorious thing that noths.
(5) Thus is inverted the central idea of our religious tradition: the idea of a sacred utterance, the Word of God, enshrined in a text. The text remains sacred, but is no longer the word (the logos). It is the absence of the word, the ‘taking back’ of God’s primeval utterance.
(6) However, while truth, legitimacy, authority, objectivity, meaning and reality all slip away into the void, one thing remains: the skeleton on which these masks were hung, which is power – the power of the possessor over the dispossessed, of the bourgeois over the proletarian, of man over woman, of ‘straight’ over ‘gay’. It is at the level of power that the contest between the many readings of the text is played out. The power in question is not that of love or goodness or beauty, but instrumental power: the power to achieve one’s goal, however worthless. In such power there is no virtue; on the contrary. For instrumental power contains the supreme temptation, which is to make power into its own goal, so that power is pursued for the sake of power, blind, bestial and indifferent. Such is the vision of society that Foucault sets before us, and which the soixante-huitards found self-evident.
(7) Against the power of the ‘structures’ – the power that constructed the human world and which preens itself in the masterworks of European culture – there is another that may be summoned, the power of deconstruction. The intellectual can rise above the world of ordinary meanings to the perspective that mocks them. Engage with him in contest, and he will vanish before you in a mercurial haze, only to appear at your back, laughingly pointing to your defencelessness.
In a study of Orwell’s 1984 – La falsification du bien – Alain Besançon argues that the totalitarian society envisaged by Orwell can be understood only in theological terms. For it is a society founded on a transcendental negation, a supreme ‘nay-saying’ to the human condition to which there is and can be no merely human rejoinder. In this society there is only power, and the goal of power is power. In the place where love should be there is absence; in the place of law another absence; in place of obligation, friendship, responsibility and right only absence. Truth is what power decides, and reality no more than a construct of power. People can be ‘vaporised’ – for their existence was never more than provisional, a momentary arrest in the flow of unmeaning. Language has been turned against itself, so that the attempt to mean something – the desperate bid for a significant utterance – will always fail. Newspeak deconstructs the word, so that nothing speaks (or writes) in it save power. And ruling through this power is a supreme cleverness, the Mephistophelian irony of O’Brien, who undermines in his rhetoric the very system that he serves, mockingly enforcing through torture the view that torture, like everything else, is utterly pointless.
I agree with Besangon’s interpretation of Orwell, but would go one stage further. The society of 1984 is formed by projecting into reality a state of mind that exists in the actual world, and which has inhabited the brain of Western intellectuals since the Enlightenment: the religion of alienation. If people do not see what Orwell was getting at, it is not only because they have no knowledge of communist society, and no ability to imagine a system that very nearly colonised the world. Even if they do have an inkling of what went on in those places of militarised nothingness, they do not perceive the lesson contained in them. For they do not, as a rule, see that just this is the realisation of the intellectual temptation that sees nothing in society save power, and which deconstructs the human mask that covers it. In 1984 we see the realisation of what, in Foucault, is a mere idea: we encounter what it would really mean, for social reality to be a construct of power, and for truth to be power’s minion. Orwell’s Ministry of Truth offers us the key, not only to the reality of totalitarian societies, but also to the spiritual meaning of the doctrines and theories that bring them into being.
What deconstruction sets before us is a profound mystery, which can be approached only through the incantation of invented words, through a Newspeak which deconstructs its own meaning in the act of utterance. When at last the veil is lifted, we perceive a wondrous landscape: a world of negations, a world in which, wherever we look for presence we find absence, a world not of people but of vacant idols, a world which offers, in the places where we seek for order, friendship and moral value, only the skeleton of power. There is no creation in this world, though it is full of cleverness – a cleverness actively deployed in the cause of Nothing. It is a world of uncreation, without hope or faith or love, since no ‘text’ could possibly mean those transcendental things. It is a world in which negation has been endowed with the supreme instruments – power and intellect – so making absence into the all-embracing presence. It is, in short, the world of the Devil.