CHAPTER 5

Deconstruction

POSTDECONSTRUCTIVE? NEGRI, DERRIDA, AND THE PRESENT STATE OF THEORY

Nobody needs French theory. —JEAN BAUDRILLARD, 2005

It seems that we live in discouragingly posttheoretical, or even antitheoretical, academic times. Venerable interdisciplinary journal Critical Inquiry, whose advertising materials used to hail it as “Theory-Driven,” held a kind of high-profile wake for theory after 9/11, with many of theory’s luminaries (now somewhat flickering, as they approach retirement age) pronouncing the entire operation dead in the water. Even Terry Eagleton (who, to hear the New York Times tell it, in fact invented theory sometime in the late 1970s) pronounced the enterprise over and done with in his 2004 book, After Theory. The Times story on Eagleton’s book ran under the headline “Cultural Theorists, Start Your Epitaphs.” Indeed, an epicedial discourse surrounds theory in the North American press: from Christopher Hitchens in the New York Times Book Review, to articles in Slate, Salon.com, and the Chronicle of Higher Education.¹ Even the Christian Science Monitor ran a feature-story obit for theory. And, according to its Web site, “Christian Science . . . speaks to the dumb the words of Truth, and they answer with rejoicing”; so when Christian Scientists speak these words of Truth, you might begin to think there’s something to them.

However, having already lived through several deaths of theory, I’ll have to say that I’m not very impressed with the pitch and tonality of this latest rendition of “Danny Boy,” though I think it is undeniably true that a certain kind of theory (let’s call it English department or comp lit theory circa 1980-something) is in fact over and done with, and effectively has been for at least a decade. From the vantage point of the present, it’s very hard to understand why, if I recall the statistic correctly, a late-’80s MLA survey found that more than 10% of English professors surveyed thought their primary job was to show students how binary oppositions in a text cancel themselves out. If that version of “theory” is over, good riddance, one might say.

You’d never know theory was dead, though, if you ran a citation index on the big names associated with it. In 2010, the Arts and Humanities Citation index turns up 1,498 hits for Michel Foucault, 1,310 for Jacques Derrida, 699 for Gilles Deleuze, and 455 for Jacques Lacan. And these citation numbers have in fact grown steadily in recent years, up more than 60% across the board since 2003. And, contra the “theory is over” hypothesis, these numbers are substantially higher than those from the supposed heydays of theory: Foucault, always leader of the citation pack, scores only 699 hits for 1986, and 700 for 1993.

Of course, Derrida’s death in 2004, still so personally difficult for the many people whose lives he touched, has only intensified this anxiety in the theory world, broadly conceived. As the New York Times put it shortly after Derrida’s passing: “With the death . . . of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the era of big theory came quietly to a close” (Eakin 2004). Derrida’s death also painfully reminds us that all the “master thinkers” are gone, with the most-cited theorist (Foucault) having been dead for more than a quarter century, which inevitably brings up these kinds of hand-wringing marketing questions: Who’s next on the throne? Rancière? Agamben? Badiou? Can Zizek continue to write several books a year? Or is the age of big theory and big theorists indeed over?

Negri and Derrida

The last “big thing” on the North American theory horizon, arguably, has been the work of Antonio Negri. Among all the provocations contained in Negri’s recent work (with and without Michael Hardt), perhaps none is more memorable than a series of polemical provocations concerning postmodern thought in general, and the legacy of deconstruction in particular. Recall Hardt and Negri’s assessment of the contemporary, post-postmodern state of “theory” in Empire:

When we begin to consider the ideologies of corporate capitalism and the world market, it certainly appears that the postmodern and postcolonialist theorists who advocate a politics of difference, fluidity, and hybridity in order to challenge the binaries and essentialism of modern sovereignty have been outflanked by the strategies of power. Power has evacuated the bastion they are attacking and has circled around to their rear to join them in the assault in the name of difference. These theorists thus find themselves pushing against an open door. (2000, 138)

While they rail wholesale “against all [philosophical] moralisms or positions of resentment or nostalgia” (218), and have biting things to say about a number of theorists (Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial “hybridity” and Foucault’s supposedly totalizing conceptions of “power” come under heavy fire), there’s a particularly severe dismissal saved for Derrida and deconstruction. In short, they proclaim that today “the deconstructive phase of critical thought, which from Heidegger and Adorno to Derrida provided a powerful exit from modernity, has lost its effectiveness” (217).

These polemical statements by Negri and Hardt are generally read as a kind of theoretical ground clearing: if Empire is to be, as the New York Times hailed it, the “next big idea” (Eakin 2001) in North American avantgardist theory, it has to proclaim the old king (deconstruction) dead. In other words, Negri and Hardt’s comments concerning deconstruction are easily dismissed as rhetorical flourish, a kind of theoretical one-upmanship that functions largely as an ad campaign for the arrival of a new market maker at the theory store: there’s a new meta-theory in town, ready to dominate the theoretical marketplace as deconstruction has, on and off, for the last quarter century.

While this kind of theory MC-boasting happens all the time in academic circles, and the theory industry’s star system is an interesting site of reflection in its own right, my question or line of inquiry here will be somewhat different. I’d like to take Negri and Hardt’s statements about deconstruction on the face of them, rather than primarily as triangulated symptoms of some marketing war or attempted cornering of the futures market on conceptual paradigms in the humanities. Taken quite literally, what might this provocation mean: “the deconstructive phase of critical thinking . . . has lost its effectiveness”? Is there a way of understanding this intervention outside the “theory marketplace” explanation, which would suggest that deconstruction has had its run, saturated the market, but it’s now passé and needs to step aside for a new trend to take over? Though such a “market” explanation is true enough (for this and, let’s face it, virtually any other phenomenon today), I wonder whether examining recent historical, economic, biopolitical events (seismic shifts “outside” academic theory debates per se) might make some other kind of sense from Negri and Hardt’s argument concerning deconstruction? Might theoretical discourses like deconstruction deploy historical force outside (or at least in addition to) the ins and outs of academic fashion? Is there something, for example, about the current socioeconomic situation—the end of the cold war, globalization, post-Fordism, the rise of so-called immaterial labor, or the intensifications of postmodern “finance capital”—that renders the tools and procedures of deconstruction problematic, in need of supplementation, or even maybe obsolete? Likewise, if Negri’s work has not become the next big thing—nor Rancière, Agamben, Badiou—we might want to speculate concerning the reason.

To put the question slightly differently: Derrida consistently insisted that deconstruction is not a method, but much more a situation. As Derrida put it the late 1980s, for example, deconstruction “is what is happening today, in what they call society, politics, diplomacy, economics, historical reality, and so on and so forth. Deconstruction is the case” (1990b, 85). Here, I’m less interested in the status of deconstruction in such a statement than I am in using Negri’s provocation as a wedge to do some thinking about “what is happening today”; and to think about how our “situation”—especially the economics of today—might or might not have changed substantially since the days when one could confidently say that “deconstruction is the case.”

The Specter’s Smirk

Despite Empire’s incessant claims to everything “new,” the book’s sentiments concerning deconstruction’s demise only intensify the critique of deconstruction launched by Negri in “The Specter’s Smile,” his response to Derrida’s 1993 Specters of Marx. Here Negri suggests that “there’s something exhausted” (1999, 10) in deconstruction, that Derrida’s work is haunted by “an aura of nostalgia,” saturated “with a regressive pause (the immersion in ‘the work of mourning’)” (8). In short, and at his most polemical, Negri insists that “deconstruction remains prisoner of an ineffectual and exhausted definition of ontology” (12), a neo-Heideggerian cocktail of flown gods and techno-phobia that’s not particularly well suited to the productive complexities and capacities of the post-postmodern world of globalization.

Harsh as Negri’s sentiments might sound, I’d argue that his is not so much a dismissal of deconstruction per se as it is a genealogical account of philosophical “critique” itself—or, more precisely, a genealogical account of the relations between philosophical critique and recent innovations within capitalism. In other words, Negri here questions the critical presuppositions of virtually all poststructuralist theory (negative critique, demystification, the demonstration of a necessary ambiguity, the breaking up of binary totalities, the freeing up of possibility, etc.)—presuppositions central to what he calls “the theoretical climate of the rue d’Ulm [École normale supérieure]” (5) in the 1950s. In other words, Negri’s is as much a critique of contemporary Marxism and its Althusserian heritage as it is a critique of Derrida and deconstruction.

Tracing out Negri’s positive claims concerning deconstruction may help to contextualize the critical ones. He writes, “The deconstructionist claim to a Marxian tradition and a Marxian spirit is even more valuable if . . . we take into consideration the rigorously critical direction that deconstruction embodies—a hermeneutic direction (in its own ontological manner) which takes part in capitalism’s historical and conceptual world only to oppose itself to it from the first through demystification—demystification of its language, in the first place, and then by way of and behind language, demystification of a ‘metaphysics of the proper’ and a state of ‘logocentrism’ encapsulated in capitalism’ ” (6). For Negri, a certain unshaking commitment to demystification and difference (against the rule of binary normativity) is the most obvious link between Derrida and the “spirit of Marxism.”²

From its inception, the project of deconstruction has shared with Marxism, however uneasily, the project of denaturalizing all the meta-theories of ideological totalization. While remaining very skeptical of the category “ideology critique,” Derrida’s deconstructive itinerary has nevertheless set its sights on subverting the hierarchizing metaphysics of presence that grounds totalizing Western ideologies—privileged states that configure themselves only by abjecting their others in the constitution of a supposedly “pure” state of uncontaminated presence. The totalization of “the nation” abjects and canalizes the myriad possibilities of “the people”; the privilege of the masculine is bootstrapped on the abjection of the feminine; the privilege of whiteness is based upon a founding metaphysics of exclusion and purity that deconstruction can show to be completely incoherent. After deconstruction, all that’s left of these founding metaphysical oppositions is the mystery of the desire for totalization itself, the trace of a founding allergy toward the other, the forgetting being’s originary openness (différance), and the continued project of upsetting a techno-capitalist metaphysics of presence. In the end, Derrida reminds us, the conditions of totalization’s possibility are simultaneously the conditions of its impossibility (1982, 328); and deconstruction, as another name for justice, stands always on guard against the totalizing dreams of ideologues, past and present (see, e.g., Derrida 1990a). Wherever a claim to totalization rears its dominating, logocentric head, there deconstruction has a job to do. Even the most seemingly totalizing matrix of relations, Derrida shows us, “nevertheless opens, leaving room for the unanticipatable singularity of the event; it remains by essence, by force, nonsaturable, nonsuturable, invulnerable, therefore only extensible and transformable, always unfinished” (1993, 34).

However incredibly productive and oppositional this deconstructive insight has proven to be over the years, Negri points out that our contemporary masters (corporations, media conglomerates, spin doctors, finance capitalists, post-Fordist outsourcers of all kinds) no longer dream of a kind of exclusionary, binary totalization and don’t achieve their hegemonic effects primarily through a normatively repressive logocentrism. What we’ve been calling post-postmodern capitalism is, as Negri and a host of others have argued, no longer exactly logocentric: it no longer primarily demands or seeks a kind of mass conformity, sameness, or totalization. Rather, today’s cutting-edge capitalism celebrates and rewards singularity, difference, and openness to new markets and products.

As a related example of Negri’s argument concerning the anti-logocentric theoretical climate of the Parisian Latin Quarter in the ’50s, think for a moment of Foucault’s work and its relation to the present. Foucault, of course, never could have envisioned, much less analyzed, what we call “globalization” as a mode of power. In fact, Foucault expended most of his political and theoretical energy smoking out the hidden indignities of a form of governmental power that’s largely lost hegemony in the decades since his death: namely, the welfare state. One of the primary upshots of Foucault’s mammoth studies of the madhouse, the prison, and sexuality is to show how the “helping hand” of modern welfare governments is a continuation and intensification of another mode of power (the chopping off of hands and the other “sovereign” modes of early modern power that so vividly open Foucault’s Discipline and Punish). The vast panoptic society that Foucault envisions may or may not have come to full fruition in the so-called first world under the dictates of a global Fordism from the 1920s through the 1970s; but, one way or another, we’d have to admit that the totalizing, logocentric Fordist assembly line (“the factory”) is no longer the dominant mechanism for explaining or harnessing social, economic, and cultural production in the West. Though one would have to admit with alacrity (and with Negri) that the Marshall Plan Keynesian Fordism of the 1950s, the petri dish in and against which École normale supérieure philosophy of the same period grew, was thoroughly logocentric.

As even deconstruction’s proponents (people like me) will admit, not a whole lot has changed about the methodological aspects of Derrida’s work since its inception in the early 1960s. Certainly the topics have changed considerably over the years, from the early double readings of philosophy proper, to a fascination with the powers of literature “before” philosophy, the Levinasian turn to ethics, an increasingly recognizable engagement with politics (apartheid, Marx, the New Europe, terrorism), to the later work’s obsession with messianism and a “religion without religion.” Of course, such periodizing is difficult for such a monumentally prolific and wide-ranging thinker (who’s also made crucial interventions on autobiography, painting, video, gender studies, linguistics, and psychoanalysis, not to mention his reinvigoration of the epicedium as a postmodern form); and one could easily demonstrate that the supposedly “late” Derridean interests in politics, ethics, and religion are written all over the “early” work, and vice versa. In any case, there’s a remarkable methodological consistency in Derrida’s work, a consistency that is the hallmark of any towering philosophical figure: the initial Derridean insistence on deconstructing binary oppositions (and emphasis on the necessarily cofounding status of the so-called excluded term) has proven enormously productive in its nomadic migrations from a neo-Saussurean point about the signified and its reliance on the signifier, into politics, culture, ethics, sexuality, and a thousand other varied sociophilosophical discourses.

Following Negri’s line of inquiry, though, one could push a bit harder on the historical fact that this emphasis on “binary oppositions” is a figure native to the cold war and to the normative, Fordist economic imperatives of the post-WWII nation-state that so negatively conditioned the climate of 1950s and ’60s French intellectuals. With the hindsight of history, for example, one can easily see the influence of the cold war nation-state and its Fordist economic imperatives in Althusser’s (1971) work on ideological state apparatuses, where he argues that schools and other superstructural or cultural apparatuses function largely as factories for the Fordist reproduction of the dominant ideology. Likewise, Deleuze’s work on the incessant quality of escape and lines of flight seems clearly rooted in resistance to “the present” of midcentury global Fordism and the norms of the cold war nation-state. Trapped between American consumerism on one side and Russian communism on the other, it’s not surprising that most continental political theory of the mid- to late twentieth century found itself trying to find a kind of “third way” between the structuring binary oppositions of the cold war: inside/outside, self/other, public/private, system/lifeworld, aesthetics/politics, ethics/morality, writing/reading, totalization/fragmentation, nature/culture, rationality/irrationality.

All of these oppositions in some sense boil down to this master binary: open/closed. Are there, in short, ways to keep “open” the inherently totalizing, exclusionary desires of sociopolitical power? There are, of course, a lot of ways of dealing with this question within recent political theory, but Negri’s genealogical point is that there’s also a great deal of shared ground in mid- to late twentieth-century continental philosophy on this topic. Consider, for example, Habermas and Derrida: on the one hand is the Habermasian legacy of critical theory, which would want to emphasize the importance of norms; on the other, a deconstructive emphasis on subversion of norms. But both Derrida’s deconstruction and Habermas’s communicative rationality perform their political work in the name of a greater openness, in the service of expanding the “open” end of the “open/closed” binary opposition. Whether openness is all about norms, or all about their subversion, both ends of this debate would seem to harness virtually all of their political energy from staving off the specter of “binary” or “instrumental” totalization: openness or possibility versus its dampening on a rigid, inflexible, univocal standard of value or right.³ Put most simply, Negri’s argument or critique is that a binary notion of “normalization” is not the primary problem with contemporary capitalist culture, or at least it’s not the same problem it was at midcentury for someone like Adorno.

So, one might say, the techniques of poststructuralist critique have remained more or less similar from the 1950s to today: demonstrate the inevitable remainder—excess or lack—left by totalizing gestures. But the dominant socioeconomic suite of forces (one of the prime targets of that critique, the situation in which deconstruction hopes to intervene) has changed radically. As Negri sums up the economic changes of the past half century,

The juridico-constitutional system based on the Fordist compromise, strengthened by the constituent agreement between the national bourgeoisie and the industrial working class, and overdetermined by the conflict between the Soviet and US superpowers . . . has thus run out its time. There is no longer a long-term war between two power blocs at the international level, within which the civil war between classes might be cooled down by means of immersion in the Fordist constitution and/or in the organizations of the Welfare State. . . . The whole scenario is now radically changed. (Hardt and Negri 2000, 215)

In short, Negri’s “historical” critique of deconstruction is that, like most poststructuralist theory, it “pushes against an open door” when it insists on the critical potential of openness, fluidity, and the hidden or uncharted possibilities buried within a binary or logocentric essentialism. “Global capitalism” is likewise a sworn enemy of essentialism, and a big backer of multiple ways of proceeding (the famous “flexible specialization”). Negri argues that the regimes of hyperflexible advanced finance capital are in fact immune from a certain kind of demystifying “deconstruction,” precisely because these supple and mobile economic formulations don’t primarily desire or produce binary totalizing effects. Contemporary global capitalism produces its effects—totalizing or otherwise—only through embracing the event of dispersion, differentiation, and singularization, rather than fighting endlessly against this open-ended state of affairs.

Post-postmodern materialism, of Negri’s neo-Deleuzian variety, bases itself on an explicit critique of this whole postmodernist, “anti-totalization” mode of thinking. In other words, global capitalism of the advanced type doesn’t want to totalize anything at all—other than this sense of fluid openness. So maybe the stake of considering Derrida around the topics of globalization or contemporary capitalism has less to do with seeing whether Derrida does or doesn’t have anything helpful or compelling to say about these topics—of course he does, or he doesn’t, depending on what you already bring to your reading of Derrida and how you feel about deconstruction. Nobody comes to deconstruction without an angle of approach. Maybe the most interesting question concerning deconstruction and the contemporary moment is less what deconstruction has to say about “today” (very interesting questions concerning how one might “de-construct” the claims or ideologies of global capitalism, foremost among them right now the so-called War on Terror), but to look more obliquely at what “today” has to say to deconstruction. This is Negri’s approach in “The Specter’s Smile”: “the question ‘whither Marxism?’ is inextricable from the question ‘whither deconstruction?,’ and both presuppose a ‘whither capitalism’?” (1999, 6).

The historical project of deconstruction is perhaps most accurately described as the deconstruction of totalization, including (one might say, especially) capitalist totalization (the presence-fetishizing required by clock- and work-time, the reduction of all human and nonhuman relations to market relations, etc.). But with a mutation in the dominant mode of “totalization” in our world, whither deconstruction, a discourse dedicated to the exposure and overturning of an “essentialist” mode of power that’s certainly not disappeared by any means, but is no longer dominant? What happens to the critical discourse “deconstruction” when capitalism in practice assumes the role of “deconstructor” par excellence? Capital may have fought the critical, norm-busting force of deconstruction throughout much of its history. “But now,” Negri asks, “in the face of the total subsumption of society and the complete multi-nationalization of the productive processes, what alternative does it [capitalism] have left? Directly, today, the innovative process destructures, deconstructs capital. . . . Deconstruction is the broken line which leads across the transformations of the form of value” (1996, 159). To his credit, Derrida was fond of coining other historical names for deconstruction—recall that he was happy to rename deconstruction as “perestroika” in the early 1990s. Perhaps we should add “global capitalism” to the list of alternate names for deconstruction? I take this to be Negri’s genealogical question.

The Theory Futures Market

As people invested in the discourses of theory today, are we to be encouraged or discouraged? Has deconstruction “won” or “lost” in relation to the armature of contemporary capitalism? Has deconstruction’s triumph as a kind of capitalist epistemology ironically cost it the store in terms of its status as a critical discourse? In the end, there are an undecidable number of ways to grapple with the upshot of these events, but here I’d like to highlight two readings, both touching on the question of discouragement, obsolescence, or general exhaustion supposedly engulfing the discourses of theory today. On one reading, this is a very discouraging story indeed: deconstruction, the once-proud king of the critical discourses, now eaten alive, co-opted, by the inexorable machine that is capitalism. The deconstructed blazer was one thing, but how soon is it until we see Derrida on a billboard, parked in front of an Apple computer, or we’re reminded that he, like Jack Kerouac, wore khakis? I’ll call this one the “Borg” theory of reception (“resistance is futile”—they will co-opt everything); and while it seems to me that this isn’t the most productive general reading of recent history, it is a plotline that’s surprisingly prevalent on the US cultural left today (how else could a provincial know-nothing like Karl Rove remain situated as a Machiavellian genius within dominant political discourse)? Deconstruction here becomes a subgenre of a larger kind of lament about reception and contemporary capitalism: “They’ve stolen our icons again and drained them of all the cool libratory content.” As my hipster friends lament, “Yeah, Zeppelin was still cool, until it played under a Cadillac commercial.” And don’t even get them started on the Flaming Lips’ Hewlett-Packard commercial, or the indignity of our greatest bard of alienation, Iggy Pop, hawking luxury cruises (who knew that shuffleboard constituted a “Lust for Life”?). Co-optation—it had to happen to deconstruction as well. Very discouraging.

On another reading, however, there really isn’t anything to be discouraged about here. Negri’s reading shows us that the “abstruse theorist” of the Times obituary was in fact correct: “Deconstruction is the case” under the rule of advanced global finance capital. Money, unmoored from any reference or gold standard, has arrived as the transversal conceptual machinery for constantly modulating “value” throughout the global socius. From the stock market to the corner market, it’s all about floating rates of exchange: how much force does your currency deploy, and what kind? As anyone who lost a great deal of retirement savings in the 2008 market crash knows—or, for that matter, as anyone who’s lost a great deal in the last ten seconds of an eBay auction knows—economic value at the edge of capitalism is in the process of being remade as an ongoing destruction of older norms in the name of producing, measuring, and evaluating “other” flows. Advanced global finance capital, one might say, is the most intense example of deconstruction (and vice versa). At some level, if this is correct (and I think it is), this should make us feel quite encouraged about theory’s futures: Abstruse theorist was right—binary essentialist schemes are yesterday’s news! As people interested in theory, this hardly leaves us without work to do.

We will of course have to redirect our efforts and stop worrying quite so much about “the next big thing” or spending quite so much time deconstructing particular artifacts. As I’ll argue at more length in the next chapter, continuing to understand “theory” primarily as a series of methods for producing novel interpretations of cultural artifacts is, and to my mind always has been, the road to nowhere. Today, the “deconstructive” insight is not the purview of a single critical paradigm or hermeneutic method, but it is in fact what Derrida claimed it was: “the case, what is happening today.” Deconstruction is not an esoteric knowledge to be lorded over by nerdy gurus like humanities professors. On the contrary: the necessary, structural openness of all systems is no longer so much an elite knowledge as it is what we might venture to call the “common.”

So, in the end, I would have to agree with Negri when he intimates that deconstruction is obsolete as a critical or hermeneutic method for enacting what he calls “an exit from modernity.” But, equally following from Negri’s account, we’d have to admit that deconstruction thus understood hasn’t failed at all, but has in fact triumphed, insofar as it is or it names the ongoing enactment of that very flight. Deconstruction, then, is no longer an exit from where we are; but, just as important, deconstruction is where we are: deconstruction is the logic of value under late, later, or just-in-time capitalism. Freed from the restrictive job of having to show us again and again that we don’t know the dancer from the dance, “theory” in this sense is hardly dead, but just being born.