PRACTICING DECONSTRUCTION IS NOT CONSTRUCTIVE.

The Unbearable Complexity of Being (Joshua Green, Boston Globe, 8/31/03)

IT'S NOT EVERY DAY that a professor issues a public apology to his students for leading them astray intellectually. But in his most recent book, "The Moment of Complexity" (Chicago), Mark C. Taylor, a distinguished professor of humanities at Williams College, does just that.

Nearly 20 years ago, Taylor established himself as a preeminent American practitioner of deconstruction with his book "Erring: A Postmodern A/Theology." But in "The Moment of Complexity," which appears this week in paperback, he claims he will no longer teach students the paralyzing deconstructive conceit that "all they have to look forward to is the endless struggle to undo systems and structures that cannot be undone." Deconstruction, an unregenerate product of the Cold War, is addicted to futility, Taylor writes.

Here is Richard Posner on deconstruction:

Orthodox language theory regards all these impediments to perfect conceptual transfer, or "intersubjectivity," as impurities or corruptions that nomally, if not always, can be overcome. And this is the point against which decontruction mounts its theoretical assault: it insists that to regard those properties of signifiers that impede communication as secondary is arbitrary and culture-bound rather than, as the orthodox theorists suppose, logical or "natural." It is just as logical, just as natural, deconstruction insists, to subordinate the communicative function of discourse to the communication-impeding effects of the signifiers that the speaker or writer uses, and thus to attend to the "play of the signifiers," which is to say to the relations between the signifiers and other concepts besides the one intended to be signified. The practitioner of deconstruction may take an ostensibly serious prose passage and immediately get hiung up on the first word, which may be an unintended pun or a homonym or a false cognate or may contain a subordinate meaning (perhaps deeply buried in its root) at war with the surface meaning. Or he may become fascinated with the shape of the letters or the visual pattern that they make on the page. Or he may juxtapose passages that are unrelated at the level of commuication, in order to jar the reader out of his conventional response and into attending to the play of the signifiers. Or he may treat an earlier writing as a commentary on a later one. Moreover, consistent with his program of forcing attention to the noncommunicative aspect of language, the deconstructionist will insist on the problematic character of regarding an author as "present" in his text in the same way tat we suppose a speaker to be present in his utterance. He will point out that writing, by its permanence (relative to speech), can outlive the communicative occasion that brought it forth by outliving the author, the readers whom the author intended to address, and its original linguistic and cultural context. [Emphasis added.]

Posner, Richard, Law and Literature, A Misunderstood Relation (Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge, 1988), at 212-213.

I would ordinarily make some snide comment about it taking Taylor twenty years to figure out that deconstructionism is not constructive, but to absolve him of any blame if any of his students were so far gone as to take this seriously. But Posner goes on to note "Cain's mordant comment on Derrida's contribution to Deconstruction and Criticism, . . . 'for readers with a lifetime to spare, there is also a 100-page essay by Jacques Derrida, dealing with a subject yet to be determined'" (Ibid., at 215 n.5 (citation omitted)), which makes me wonder if Taylor hasn't crammed a lifetime of learning into twenty short years. Posted by David Cohen at August 31, 2003 6:22 PM