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Engineer Deconstructs Literary Criticism
DNS-and-BIND writes "This is the story of one computer professional's explorations in the world of postmodern literary criticism. Wouldn't it be nice to work in a field where nobody can say you're wrong?"
Another widely reported exploration into post-modernist literature was "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" by Sokal. Sokal says, in order to "test the prevailing intellectual standards, I decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment: Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies -- whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross -- publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions? The answer, unfortunately, is yes."
Crikey!
The Army reading list
Wouldn't it be nice to work in a field where nobody can say you're wrong?
That's a field where everyone says you're wrong about everything.
In eleventh grade, I wrote my term paper on The Hobbit. Part of the assignment was to provide literary criticism of the work. I cited sources that stated how JRR Tolkien HATED allegory and reading deeper into works and therefore claimed I didn't need to provide any literary criticism of the Hobbit. My teacher bought it and I got an A. Tolkien rocked because he felt literature should be taken at face value.
Isn't it interesting how you come to recognize posters based solely on their sigs???
You haven't been around any English departments, have you? My wife has an MA in English, and it sounds like the department was pretty vicious.
I'd argue that it's a lot harder being in a field with "soft" realities. Anything you say is subject to criticism, and it's really hard to "prove" you're right. I'll take an objective field, where I can demonstrate truth or falsehood irrefutably, any day. (I know that's an overstatment: you can always debate the meaning of experimental results. But you get the idea.)
Happens all the time in meetings everywhere. The boss says something totally wrong and the room is silent.
The author shows terrific mastery and use of the rhetorical literary deconstruction techniques he derides. In other words, he couldn't have written the article without the very skills and work he criticizes.
Q: What do you get when you cross a Post Modernist with a Mafioso??
A: An offer you can't understand.
afterwards I'd wondered if we were talking the same language.
The first case was with a techincal support representitive with a large company that had migrated alot of their after-hours support staff off site. (The company rhymes with Crisco, the off site location rhymes with blindia.)
I'm not in any way being critical of the country of origin, and I _know_ this person was speaking in english...but we weren't talking the same language. Curiously, his emails were completely understandable...it was the verbal conversation I couldn't grok.
The second was a meeting of high level Government IT staff, and some other members of government to discuss centralizing Internet services. Things were going well as we all introduced ourselves and stated what we wanted to get out of the collaboration. Then a lady came to the floor and spoke very eloquently for a good five minutes.
I have no clue what she said.
I asked about her afterwards and it turns out that she was a) a lawyer, b) an elected representative, and c) a manager.
Pretty much a lit crit Trifecta!
Naturally the group dissolved after a few meetings when it was determined it was too little too late and the existing issue too complex to put in one box.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Engineer's Disease has claimed another victim.
"engineers disease": The delusion because you're ubercompetent in your chosen field, you're automatically an expert on everything else.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Consider the following paragraph from the article:
Now read an essay by the postmodernism generator. Can you tell the difference? ;-)
Wouldn't it be nice to work in a field where nobody can say you're wrong?"
Unfortunately, the postmodernists have attempted to apply their idiotic claptrap to science, claiming the existence of such absurd concepts as "alternative scientific truths". What they miss is that science is empirical, and therefore deals with observed characteristics of the real world (i.e., "facts").
I've always wanted to throw one out of a plane over China, and yell after them as they plummet to their death: "how are you finding that Far-Eastern Gravitation?"
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
Actually, everybody can say you're wrong. They just can't prove it.
My favourite example of postmodern papers is the Notes on postmodern programming. AFAIC they wrote it in order to get their tickets payed to a symposium. They could have been srious, but that's a rather scary though considering it includes one page with a hand drawn and rather irrelevant image.
Quite interesting and amusing though.
This text is several years old, at least. In fact, the wayback machine puts it at about 5 years old.
Come on guys, you know this is really, really old.
*everything* is Orwellian to cats.
The article says:
"Another minor point, by the way, is that we don't say that we deconstruct the text but that the text deconstructs itself."
In soviet russia, perhaps.
Baz
>> We engineers are frequently accused of speaking an alien language, of wrapping what we do in jargon and obscurity in order to preserve the technological priesthood.
I don't like where he went with this. The argument is that postmodernists speak with such obscurity, that they wrap themselves into an island. And that what they really say is just intellectual masturbation. Sure. Of course. Doctors, programmers, lawyers... all have this.
Personally, why not use words specific to the field? I don't think dumbing down should be encouraged. Learn the jargon, it doesn't take that long to do. Read a few theory books. Properly used, $0.50 words should not be labeled as 'jargon,' but simply as words to help facilitate communication into the edge of thought.
The Custom Mary
Most subtle, nuanced statements are going to sound pretty stupid if you render half the words meaningless and remove their context, which is exactly what happens when an outsider hears the language of some specialized field. It's very difficult for outsiders to judge the legitimacy of a field from the outside.
I see this all the time in the general public's reactions to both software and science, especially theoretical physics and medicine.
The article's author actually says this really well:
He goes on to draw what I think is a really useful conclusion (much more insightful than most of the posts on this thread, I'm afraid):
I wonder what we might learn if comprehensibility returned to the equation. There are a lot of very interesting ideas buring in academia.
I had to call some tech-support guys in Swanwick (you don't pronounce the second 'w') to re-load some data I accidentally RM'd- and I know he was speaking the Queens english but I'll be DAMNED if I understood a word of it. Mind you, I find Scottish brogue to be charming and sometimes understandable, but this fellow made Cockney sound like the AT&T computer operator voice.
On a differnet note I called other tech support (this time in Florida) and tried to figure out how I could print from our ol' VM system. We were on the phone for 45 minutes, I tuned him out after 15 and just did screen captures and cut and pastes because he obviously had no idea what he was talking about, but sure had a lot of ideas. He seemed genuinely proud of the work he had just done for me, too! I hadn't the heart to tell him I did it the cut and paste way.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
I was prepared for a philistine reaction to a barely-understood domain, but instead the piece was earnest, honest and clear-eyed.
Most cultural studies academics are aware the problems of empty jargonizing, a reaction to it set in a while ago, and things are getting better. Part of the problem is that critical theory in practice is just that - practice, not new research, in working with texts. There's the same sort of inflationary pressures going on with people trying to make their work look as important as possible.
But there's a great deal of baby in the bathwater that's being thrown out. Sokal's best contribution was the recommendation that a metaphor used in criticism should be more, not less, accessible than the subject of the metaphor (if you're using x to explain y, x should be more, not less, comprehensible than y).
Ultimately, it should also be recognized that art, literature, and culture are a different type of domain from physics, even if it sometimes borrows its rhetoric. In one way, however, there's a similarity: the claim that there's "no right answer" in criticism is only true in the way that "nothing is ever proven true, only not yet falsified" in empirical science. In both cases, although in different ways, it's about comparing models.
As soemone who is getting thier Phd in a liberal arts field, let me just say that in reality, like any other field 90% of the stuff I read is crap. Once you get to the graduate level and move beyond the stuff that is famous in a field you will see how little good quality stuff there really is out there. I just started this last semester on my phd. I am finding that in my classes here at my new university, a good 75% of the assigned readings are either the exact same articles that I read in my masters program, or just articles that have the same ideas as other articles I've already read. While there are dozens of journals publishing papers every months, there is really just a very small finite amount of work that is really noteworthy.
In doing my personal research there have been lots and lots of books where I shook my head and asked myself how this could have been published. The same is true of conferneces. I've been to a handfull of academic conferences and it never fails that the vast majority of the papers presented are pointless or trivial. (Certainly there may be people who saw my paper and thought the same thing, who knows). Thus it is not surprizing that the conference discussed in the article was full of crap.
So lets not jump on academia and say it is ALL a bunch of crap. Yes 90% of it is but how is that any different than any other field. How often are there articles about incompetent tech support, or IT guys who just totally screw up simple things? Remember, 90% of everything is crap.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Wouldn't it be nice to work in a field where nobody can say you're wrong?
If you're advanced enough in any field this can be so.
As long as your code works a bit, it isn't wrong, just not robust, or sub optimal.
The article really isn't about deconstructing the humanities at all. That was the method the author used to expose the deeper problem: that the humanities are suffering because their most artful practicitioners have isolated themselves and no longer respond to the community.
One thing he didn't really emphasize, but only alluded to (in a paragraph where he admits how this thinking caused him to understand why it might be important to conisder the fraility of many kinds of writing) is that these humanitarian skills are really useful! Only undergrads aren't really shown what they could do with them in the real world, besides branching off into various fields of media criticism.
He should have driven his conclusion home harder... that academia needs a slap upside the head, and we ("Nerds") all could help a little.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
That paper used lots of big words and I didn't understand it at all, so it must have been written by really smart people!
"Wouldn't it be nice to work in a field where nobody can say you're wrong?"
Choose software engineering, then. There is no known defence against the "It's not a bug, it's a feature" counter attack.
in said scene, a literary critic develops a program to count the frequency of words in a given book (ignoring prepositions, pronouns and the like) and then display the 20 most and least frequent words. the theory is that the core concept of the book can be gleaned by simply reading these lists.
now i have tried this myself and can say, while it does not work to the level stated by calvino, it does certainly give you a feel for the book. different genres have noticable word distributions especially. it's easy to identify, say, a western or sci-fi or romance novel from these lists.
2 1337 4 u!
I don't get why no one seems to have made that argument. It came to my mind within seconds of hearing the story.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Wesley Phoa has written a good text called
Should Computer Scientists Read Derrida? that i can only recommend. Unlike the usual Deconstruction-Bashers that don't bother to understand what Deconstruction is about, this text, written by mathematician, is pretty clued up!
As an avid reader, I have to say that this entirely true. But then again, deconstruction is not about being intellectual. It's about SEEMING intellectual, when in fact all you are doing is rewriting somebody else's work using the tersist means possible. In short: deconstruction is creative writing for essayists. It is a tool for those learning how to write. And expecting something so masturbatory to be anything more than a bit of clever fun is going to result in anti-intellectual rage.
When you deconstuct a work, you create a paper which is impossible to fail on a theoretical basis, because each deconstruction is in fact its own theoretical entity. It's very hard to say, objectively, that a deconstruction is "wrong." And therefore, in the eyes of many professors, your grade on this paper can only be judged on its logical progression and its written style.
In short: deconstructions can be interesting, can be fun, and show off a person's analytical and prosaic talents. But no, they aren't going to further the "intellectual" pursuit of writing. But this is no different from a forensics meet, where people argue a position they themselves may not hold, to showcase their oration and research talents. This is no different from a poetry slam or rap battle, where people read disconnected passages to gain a subjective edge over other poets. And it's certainly no different from engineers engaging in robot battles, code obfuscation contests, or blog entries about how literary criticism is bullshit.
Incidentally, while deconstructionists can never be wrong because they write their own assumptions, literary critics in general CAN be. In fact, one of my favorite exercises in my 350 level discourse class was to rebutt a literary criticism from the New York Times magazine. Literary critics make mistakes in logic, levy unfair comparisons and make mistakes of intent all the time, and these often result in an unlikely hypothesis being legitimized. Hence the popularity of Ayn Rand!
Hey freaks: now you're ju
A nice piece of sophistry. However, when the hoax was exposed the editors of Social Text didn't take it so philosophically. They had, and there's no polite way to put this, a s**t hemmorage. They accused Sokal of mopery and dopery and aggravated intention to loiter. They claimed that he was really a right winger and that his volunteer work in Nicaragua was a lie.
Like most stuffed shirts they didn't handle looking foolish very well.
The man who never alters his opinion is like the stagnant water and breeds Reptiles of the Mind -- William Blake
> And it's certainly no different from
> engineers engaging in robot battles
Hm. I wouldn't lump this in with the obfuscated code contests. Programming a Robocode bot, for example, is "clever fun", yes, but it's also a good exercise in learning more about search and evade techniques, trig, and so forth.
A bot programmer is bound by the constraints of the bot environment - time allowed for each move, effect of a hit, etc - and thus must deal with those constraints to produce an effective bot. And the bots themselves are certainly "capable of being wrong" in that a poorly written bot will usually be crushed by the better ones.
The Army reading list
Sokal published a follow-up to the article describing all the intentional bogosity used in it, an article which those selfsame self-deceived editors rejected as "not meeting intellectual standards".
The editors saw something worthwhile to themselves, it is true: an opportunity to preen their feathers and strut their scientific sophistication in public. That the principles of postmodernism failed to disclose to them the hook inside the bait, a hook obvious to most geeks who read the original article, oughtn't to escape your attention.
Another thing to consider is, postmodernists claim to be able to deconstruct anything. That goes for your post, as well. You have no standing to insist that it means any particular thing, if I want to see it otherwise.
It's a goose-and-gander thing.
Aptal soru yoktur; sadece merakli aptallar vardir.
Modern literary criticism is like long drawn out hari-kari. Who knows why anyone would torture themselves with it. It reminds me of many years ago when I went back to college for an MFA in painting and happened to also take a cross-disciplinary course in literary criticism. My first degree had been in English and I'd decided not to pursue it because it just seemed fatuous, completely unrelated to the world I live in. Well anyway I'd hadn't been in this cross-disciplinary seminar for more than 10 minutes before my head started spinning and I had this horrible feeling of deja-vu, stuck in fatuous neverneverland, where anything could be said but nothing could be proved or disproved.
It's sort of like all code can only consist of goto statements and you spend all your time chasing your tail trying to find out what something really means, or where it gets its value. You can't because there'e nothing concrete there. Every goto goes to a new goto. The buck stops nowhere.
I suppose someone might be able to enjoy this but I think that the best artists and the best programmers eventually realize that total freedom is total chaos. There have to be some truths/constants/final variables/whatever. From there you can build something worth building.
Although I'm not a literary critic, I am married to one, and she always disagreed with Derrida (the father of deconstruction theory, as I understand it). Interestingly enough, we had the chance to listen to him present a seminar a few years ago in Auckland, New Zealand, as he was participating in a conference sponsored by the Auckland University School of Philosophy.
So we went to listen to him speak (unfortunately not on deconstruction, but she was still very excited to have the chance to hear him). We left the Town Hall after the seminar and my wife said to me "Dammit, now I can't dislike him any more, he's so nice". A few seconds pause, then "But he's still wrong about deconstruction".
The message the artist tries to convey - either consciously or subconsciously - to the audience is secondary. Art should reflect the essence of the audience - not the artist - back to themselves. Does my work make you happy? Great - why do you think that is? Does it make you hopping mad/afraid/sad? Fantastic. What is it inside you that made you react in such a way?
Great art always shows you something surprising (and not necessarily pleasant) about yourself.
Needless to say, this interpretation of art got me in a world of trouble in the literary class in high school where we supposed to learn the message of a painting or a poem by reading about it.
The owls are not what they seem
I'm probably obtuse, but -- no, I still don't understand. Your point is that Sokal is making a similar argument, right? And is his argument invalid?
My spin is just the opposite of his. If I'm a Social Thought editor, the argument I make (out of sincerity or out of damage control, as the case may be) is this: all this talk of "trust" and "deception" is irrelevant. Dr. Sokal submitted a provocative article and we published it. He can declare it to be gibberish, but that no more invalidates our decision than any other instance in which a reader declares some text to be nonsensical.
To put it differently, my reaction is the same as Sokal's "Or are they more deferent to the so-called ``cultural authority of technoscience'' than they would care to admit?" I'm just surprised that they gave up so easily.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
After some searching, I found Semiotics for Begineers, which was a pretty good introduction to the field, and written with enough clarity that even this programmer could figure out the strange language. Go give it a try.
It might also help you as a programmer. We use esoteric language all the time, like '\n', 0xDEADBEEF, deques and queues, stdout, stderr, stdlog, etc. etc., and semiotics tries to explain how these somewhat random characters can be attached to ideas, so that our community can send the characters back and forth to communicate the ideas. However, if it comes to an assembler class vs. a semiotics class, please take the assembler class.
I find Sokal, on the other hand, just as much of a holier-than-thou elitist as the people he criticizes, though he's a good deal funnier.
What Morningstar claims to have found from his explorations is a few good ideas with a whole lot of shite slathered on top. That would describe many many other academic disciplines outside the humanities as well.
foldplay your photos won't know what hit them.
I remember an odd line in that book. At one point, reference is made (at least in the edition I was reading) to a "slime green volume". Since it's such an odd description, I inevitably began to wonder if it was a misprint, for either "lime green" or "slim green". Then I wondered if it could be an intentional misprint. Then I wondered if it wasn't a misprint, but was deliberatly placed to make the reader wonder about this. Then I thought about how clever the translator must have been if it was intentional. Then my head exploded.
In the spirit of "postmodern literary criticism" I choose the essay itself as my "text" and here are the exciting results.
Well, I tried to see if I could "see into" the essay as a satire and a wicked, though blunt, assessment of the current administration. I thought that the essay was a coded satire and similar to the work of Jonathan Swift, but without the humor and imagination. (Full Disclosure - I am an Engineer by training.) So here my application of the 5-Step methodology to "deconstructing" the essay.
I really don't know what Godel wrote but I have read an interpretation of it via Douglas Hofstadter's - Godel, Escher, Bach. Here is where I do find the similarities in the prescription laid out by Hofstadter and in the essay.
And here is where I can extend beyond mere literature into the nature of politics, govt, and the current administration.
True, it doesn't matter if I choose to focus on the current administration, or the mad-cow outbreak. The choice of the subject is actually one of the less important decisions that I have to make.
It is very interesting that such a standard postmodernist tactic for ducking criticism was used by Mr. Donald Rumsfeld who was awarded the prize of 'Foot in mouth' prize for for it, and actually came very close to being awarded the "Man of the Year" by Time Magazine ! (Rummy declined honor as 'Person of the Year) His award winning poem was trying to create a metaphysical confusion by the following :
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
This article simplifies a much larger issue.
Literary theory is an approach to textuality. If you posit that all knowledge that enters public sphere exists as text, then a study of the manipulation of meaning, knowledge, and interpretation is as politically necessary a venture as any I know.
And while one may complain that excessive jargon corrupts scholarship, we live in a world of jargon, coded language uttered by people with AUTHORity. It is the job of discourse theory to puncture the very heart of such authority. Thus, there are real world implications here. In fact, the whole project is being imported to secondary schools precisely because the goal of schools is to make questioning thinkers, not believers. Literary theory is a marvelous way to exercise such faculties.
Deconstruction is the most famous (and misused) reference to literary theory. It is the one most often used as an illustration of diffuse, pointless inquiry. If every person who studies theory hasn't heard this said a thousand times, then we have never heard it once. Frankly, this article it is just an immature attempt to contribute to field with an already substantial knowledge base.
This article adds nothing to it.
i think that's his point. If they (the editors) really believe that there's no privileged reading, then they shouldn't care that the author came out and said "haha! it's all crap!" because hey, the author doesn't matter.
However, they DID get upset...really upset. They should have made the argument "it doesn't matter that you didn't mean it, you still wrote really good stuff, intentionally or not" but they didn't.. in otherwords, they don't buy into their own philosophy (that the work is independent of its author)
The problem is that as scientists/engineers/rational people, the concept of "gibberish" has meaning. If "gibberish" is given the same standing in a journal like this as claimed "meaningful writing", then the logical conclusion is that there is no distinguishing between "gibberish" and "meaningful writing", and as a consequence there is no such thing as "meaningful writing" going on if it's all logically equivalent to "gibberish".
Thus, to be consistent, the po-mos must act as you say, but as scientists/engineers/rational people, we're not going to buy it and we're going to conclude they're full of crap. This bothers them, and again, it shouldn't since they despise our worldview so. This is what I believe Sokal was saying, and what I thought you were getting at. There's no inconsistency here from Sokal or the engineering camp, there's just inconsistency from the po-mos. (And hypocrisy, in the sense that by their own logic this isn't supposed to bother them, but it clearly does. As a scientist/engineer/rational person, I would claim this is because no matter how hard you try, you can only disconnect from reality so far...)
Before becoming a software engineer I got a bachelors in psychology. While in college I went to a conference on phenomenology. I had taken a couple courses on the subject and thought I had a handle on it. However, the first speaker I went to was completely incomprehensible to me. Try as I might I could not put more than three sequential words of his together into anything that made any sense. At first I questioned my intelligence, but eventually I came to the conclussion that it was all a bunch of blather.
Standing next to me (it was standing room only) was a hot chick I had spoken to prior to the talk. She was looking up at him like he was the most brilliant man alive, making little nods and short buzzing noises of agreement. I wanted to have sex with her, and this led to my moral transgression.
After he was done speaking she gushed about how brilliant he was. Deep down I wanted to ask her if she could explain what gave her that impression, but instead I agreed with her. My little head was doing the thinking. I even spouted back some of the junk he had said in order to try to impress her.
No...I did not end up having sex with her. She went off to join the groupies surrounding the speaker, and I was left alone in my shame. I had helped to perpetuate the BS.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
> using skills that are important to your
> profession for a task which is not
> useful in furthering anything but experience
Hm. To me, the battlebot thing seems to be an example of "sharpening the saw". Kind of like a baseball player taking batting practice - it doesn't score any runs, but it will later. Does literary deconstructionism serve as practice for writers?
> it is not always the best written bot
> who wins Robocode style bot battles
Sometimes, yes... but I think that's more a statement about the other bot writers' skills than the virtue of randomness. Also, a randomly constructed bot wouldn't win much, because it would probably throw exceptions all over the place. That is, there's a fair bit of order that needs to occur to produce a "random bot" - implementing the correct interfaces, choosing a random action to take, etc.
You have an interesting take on this, though. I had never considered deconstructionism as literary fun... that's a whole different viewpoint. Thanks!
The Army reading list
In fact, it was written in 1993.
Here, you can find all of them.
Chip Morningstar (together with Randy Farmer and Doug Crockford) is one of the three gurus of avatar-based virtual communities. (i.e. Habitat, Club Caribe and WorldsAway/Avaterra).
The Bogdanov Affair
I'm going to start my PhD in philosophy in the fall. However, I have also worked extensively with software and software development; I've even written some stuff destined for commercial release. I can tell you that the solidity of the truth-criteria of software development and lit crit are very, very similar, and the fact that you have no clue about the goings-on at that conference of yours speaks only of a difference in field. For instance: Are more, or fewer, comments in source code desirable? How about highly-specific, tightly-optimized assembly versus a perl script? The po-mo's (and, btw, that pastiche of terminology you collected is in no way exclusively postmodern, or even, for that matter, literary) would have just as much trouble understanding the virtues of object re-use and garbage collection and multiple inheritance, and would be just as tempted to derision.
Your critique, BTW, goes much deeper, and is much less grounded than the Sokal hoax, which confined itself to apeing a particularly noisome constellation of theory; the converse of what you have done would be an attack on computer science based on the foibles of visual basic.
The upshot is: Do not be tempted to Volkisch, chauvinist rallies about your discipline. Ignorance, IMO, is fairly evenly distributed over academe.
- undoware.ca
I'm not a card-carrying follower of the Church of Deconstruction, but I've studied it a bit, and tried to understand it. It's true that deconstruction would state that no statement is true. And that's a contradicion. But that doesn't mean it's not true. Or wait, it does. The point is, it doesn't make deconstruction less interesting. Deconstruction demonstrates how language fails, how logic is undermined by rhetoric and vice versa. The statements people draw from it are far less interesting than the thinking that leads to them. Like in all kinds of philosophy.
:-)
First, the usual disclaimer: This is a tough subject, and English is not my native language. All errors in logic and expression result from that.
That article you linked to is terrible, and the logic behind it is false or non-existant. And apparently not very honest: The author attacks deconstruction for confusing artificiality with convention and deceptive and false. However, his own argument against it is dependent on the same confusion.
Even if "all language systems are conventional" (this can't be called a "major tenet of deconstruction," as the author claims. The major tenet would be that all language is artificial, and that's something completely different.) necessarily must be a conventional statement if the statement is true, wouldn't in itself make it a self-contradictory statement. It would merely make it part of the same hermetic, conventional, language system. Now, this language system might be quite self-contradictory, and deconstruction is the philosophy of self-contradicion in the language systems, so the author isn't so far off. He just avoids the real issues of deconstruction, which have nothing to do with convention, and everything to do with artificiality.
Ferdinand de Saussure is important here, but not in the way the author thinks. The idea that the relationship between signifier (expression) and signified (meaning) is arbitrary does not lead to that meaning has "nothing to do with reality," but it does lead to the obvious fact that the two (meaning/reality) are different. What we think of the world is not the world. That should be pretty obvious: The word "I" is not the same as the person who utters "I." That a word is a fact about language, and not a fact about the world, follows from this. "Falsely," the author claims, but without any argument.
He goes on to state that Derrida's "most controversial idea," that "linguistic meaning is fundamentally indeterminate," means the same as "I cannot utter a word of English." This is plain bad logic, and also not very good rhetoric. A better analogue would be "You don't understand a word of what Derrida is saying," and that statement would be true (if said to the author of the article).
This article's main tenet (n : a religious doctrine that is proclaimed as true without proof), is as you quote: Deconstruction is a theory that is beyond being intellectually bankrupt -- it is intellectually meaningless and thus had no intellectual capital to begin with!, and the author goes out to scare people away from those who do not share that doctrine by spewing a lot of nonsense.
His main argument seems to be that Derrida doesn't follow his "master" Saussure in everything, and that is somehow "illogical", then he rounds off with concluding that "there is indeed one way to God," which he also means is "epistemologically self-evident." This article is just a bunch of anti-anti-religious propaganda. He's scared that deconstruction will destroy Authority, not truth.
From The Postmodernism Generator (http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/) Here.
The Expression of Fatal flaw: The textual paradigm of consensus in the works of Rushdie
Hans Q. Dahmus
Department of English, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
1. Consensuses of failure
"Sexual identity is part of the paradigm of truth," says Derrida. But an abundance of dematerialisms concerning the textual paradigm of consensus may be discovered.
"Society is intrinsically elitist," says Lyotard; however, according to Hanfkopf[1] , it is not so much society that is intrinsically elitist, but rather the dialectic of society. Precapitalist narrative states that art is part of the failure of culture, but only if the premise of dialectic subdeconstructivist theory is invalid. Therefore, the main theme of Pickett's[2] analysis of neodialectic cultural theory is a mythopoetical paradox.
Hanfkopf[3] suggests that we have to choose between dialectic subdeconstructivist theory and the subcapitalist paradigm of context. However, Debord uses the term 'dialectic postcultural theory' to denote the defining characteristic, and subsequent genre, of capitalist class.
Marx's critique of dialectic subdeconstructivist theory holds that art serves to reinforce sexism. In a sense, the subject is interpolated into a subdialectic desublimation that includes reality as a totality.
Sartre uses the term 'dialectic subdeconstructivist theory' to denote not, in fact, discourse, but postdiscourse. Thus, the characteristic theme of the works of Burroughs is the role of the participant as artist.
2. Realism and capitalist presemanticist theory
The main theme of Abian's[4] essay on capitalist presemanticist theory is the difference between society and class. The subject is contextualised into a Derridaist reading that includes consciousness as a paradox. However, Foucault uses the term 'capitalist presemanticist theory' to denote the meaninglessness, and some would say the defining characteristic, of textual sexual identity.
Subconstructivist theory suggests that consensus comes from communication. It could be said that the subject is interpolated into a capitalist presemanticist theory that includes language as a whole.
If the textual paradigm of consensus holds, the works of Gaiman are postmodern. Therefore, Debord uses the term 'cultural Marxism' to denote the role of the poet as artist. Lyotard suggests the use of capitalist presemanticist theory to read narrativity. However, in The Books of Magic, Gaiman affirms realism; in Neverwhere, however, he denies capitalist presemanticist theory.
1. Hanfkopf, A. B. ed. (1978) Realism in the works of Burroughs. Panic Button Books
2. Pickett, V. P. A. (1981) The Genre of Narrative: The textual paradigm of consensus and realism. Loompanics
3. Hanfkopf, R. ed. (1996) Realism in the works of McLaren. And/Or Press
4. Abian, N. D. F. (1970) The Stone Sky: The textual paradigm of consensus in the works of Gaiman. Panic Button Books
This is the meat of the article, and, to my mind, accurately picks out that which is of value in the humanities.
As far as I'm concerned, the humanities need a major overhaul. Those majoring in english or art should have their science requirements increased beyond whatever they are now. At the same time, I think the sciency types of the world should be similarly forced to undertake a number of humanities courses. But the humanities teachers should be forced to explain themselves in terms as simple, obvious, and concise as the author did above.
Now, back to my botany studies...
The "soft" position is unpopular because it leads to the conclusion that many "sciences" aren't. Psychology, sociology, and most of economics lose out. So do the "retrospective" fields, like paleontology. They're considered belief systems, not sciences. Since there are more people in those fields than in the hard sciences, this is an unpopular position.
Engineering makes it clear which position is right. Engineering is based entirely on results which are experimentally falsifiable. Only results tested by experiments which could fail, but didn't, have predictive power. Engineering is about prediction. Without prediction there is no reliability.
Anyone who has not read Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon", I recommend you borrow a copy and read the "War as Text" section about a lit-crit conference for which the protagonist is doing IT support. Dovetails nicely with the article, and is a real hoot.
Obviously, all humanities professors are not idiots. Some of it is valid (note I didn't say true, even less of it is true), but most isn't. Most of them know that most of it is horse shit.
So, why do they do it? Tenure. Publish or perish. Truly original, basic research in the humanities is so rare that they have decided that it isn't possible and make shit up instead. Not only that but the shit has to conform to the dominant style.
It all started with the rise of feminism in academia during the late sixties. Again some of the original feminist works are great and society is a better place because they were written. However instead of accepting that and moving on to other aspects of society the same paradigm of these original works was applied to every conceivable group of people in every conceivable area.
This approach has some validity and occurs in other fields as well (e.g. studying the movements due to gravity of every type of thing), but in the humanities it is usually the case that they are doing something comparable to using a theory of electro-magnetic force to explain the movement of the stars. It's either a clear misapplication of the theory or the explanatory value of the theory in that circumstance is miniscule.
The paradigm? Show how this group could have possibly been oppressed. If you are lucky, for maximum emotional effect, you'll be able to show how the opressed were actually superior to the oppressors.
For a truly wonderful example of this kind of scholarship, read anything by Judith Butler.
Disclaimer: I am not trying to say that there isn't some worthwhile stuff going on, but the demand that professors produce research creates the perfect evironment for pointless and fraudulent research. And that's true for all disciplines.
It all comes back to money. If the universities produce more research, they get more money (e.g. grants, fellowships, etc).
"in which a work is interpreted as a statement about itself, using a literary version of the same cheap trick that Kurt Gddel used to try to frighten mathematicians back in the thirties."
This is wrong. Firstly, the proof is a mathematical theorem and is an argument based on logic. Secondly, the purpose of the theorem was not to "frighten mathematicians"; it showed that the Principia Mathematica was not a completely correct model of mathematics and that any logic system as complex as arithmetic was inconsistent or incomplete. The theorem is nothing like the absurd postmodernism that the author is criticising.
You jerk, that sentence from the article was meant to illustrate the sillyness of postmodern jargon. It's the only sentence that doesn't make sense.
There are no trolls. There are no trees out here.
The problem where people in a certain sector only get interactive feedback from others in the same sector applies well to TV news anchors and newspaper writers. There is an inside look at Dan Rathers in a book by a Bernard Goldberg, "Bias". He notes how Rathers is surrounded by people who think exactly the same way he does. This leads Rather to thinking his views are centered within the mass population.
--Brian
However, I also noticed that Postmodern Lit Crit had become a growth industry on some college campuses, creating a whole strata of students and teachers involved in a constant circular conversation whose only purpose seemed to be the stimulation of recursion and the attaining of tenure. The theory produced some original and interesting thought, some patently ridiculous shit, and lots and lots of boring fiction. I even developed a nickname for such fiction -- MFA fiction. It's usually written by middle class white folk with little or no experience outside the ivory tower world with a condescending fascination on working class 'Merica.
This guy's onto that, and in a really good way. Unfortunately, any group produces its own symbols of group identity and people who are dependent on that group identity for everything, and just as there are people who would fold up and die if the next Lord of the Rings movie doesn't come out on DVD, there are people who, without their Masters degree and sense of superiority, would have no reason for living. The guy doesn't have the whole story, as there is some real value in all this theory -- The Matrix takes a lot from Baudillard and his postmodern work. Postmodernism is also a valuable tool for looking at cultural context, i.e., understanding the ways in which disparate cultures come together and clash. The "rootlessness" of Postmodernism is a great help here, as it is not dependent on one world view, such as earlier cultural analyses (Social Darwinism comes to mind). This aside, he has hit the bullseye on the bullshit side of modern Lit Crit.
I am a believer of momentum and curves.
Derrida's perceptive reply went to the heart of classical general relativity:
Does that passage make any kind of sense at all? It's even more hilarious that the Social Text editors read this and didn't realize this was meaningless babble, just because Derrida wrote it.
The posts on this site are written by a longtime techie Stephen Den Beste, but are not the usual techie subjects. I also like his Strategic Overview of the US war on terror in general, and Iraq in specific.
Also, more techie oriented, this discussion is about the creation of a Super-human Intelligence that's probably not what you'd think it is.
I read USS Clueless pretty much every day now.
I want to a highschool where literary critism was a normal event in literature classes. I've always been opposed to this nonsense, since I started out as an artist and have heard people reading things into paintings I've done, or paintings that have been done by people I know: paintings which in many cases mean absoultely nothing. In addition, a good percentage of the art teachers I've had have taught "tricks" like blind contour drawings as basis for paintings, and using color schemes that apply a meaning even when no meaning exists.
In any case, in my softmore year, we were assigned the hobbit which we had to read, and then explain what the book was really about. Aside from having read the book several times prior to the class, I happened to have the first official U.S. priting, which had a rather extensive introductory letter by tolkien. Aside from the very beginning, which talked about how this was the first printing, and not to purchase the book from other U.S. publishers (they did not have the rights to publish it and were not giving him residuals) he went on to discuss the meaning of the book -- speciffically, the entire lack thereof. He disavowed the book being a metaphore for anything, and asked the reader to accept it for what is was - a story, a flight of fancy, a fantasy which he wrote for nothing other than the purpose of enjoyment. I photocopied the introducion, wrote a quick appology for not disecting the meaning of the book considering that I felt it would be disrespectfull of the author to read meaning into it when he has specifically asked his readers not to. I got a D-.
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I got my bachelor's degree in English, Linguistics and CS. My senior thesis in English was intentionally written in plain, easy to understand US English. I received many, many compliments for the readability and understandability of my work from my thesis committee. The professors on my committee (a US News top-10 English Literature program) hate "postmodern" critical techniques. My father is an art professor at the same school. He detests this (as someone posted earlier) masturbatory writing style. I have a feeling PoMoLitCrit will be short lived. It is not taken seriously by anyone in the humanities who does not have something to hide academically. Please do not make the error of using a few academically dishonest, mistakenly tenured morons to judge the whole lot of us.
For more on this subject check out Richard Dawkin's article post-modernism disrobed
Also here Noam Chomksy reaches similar conclusions.
From Chomsky's comments...
So take Derrida, one of the grand old men. I thought I ought to at least be able to understand his Grammatology, so tried to read it. I could make out some of it, for example, the critical analysis of classical texts that I knew very well and had written about years before. I found the scholarship appalling, based on pathetic misreading; and the argument, such as it was, failed to come close to the kinds of standards I've been familiar with since virtually childhood. Well, maybe I missed something: could be, but suspicions remain, as noted.
Have you ever seen The Princess Bride? Remember the scene where the Prince is about to toast and drink with Wallace Shawn's character Vizzini the "intellectual" leader of the "bad guys". The scene's set up spawns a monologue for Vizzini wherein he thinks aloud about who's going to be a victim of "Iocaine" poison. His rationalizations about which goblet to pick begin with an attempt to read The Prince and spin off into absurdity without ever completely loosing a thread of "smart sounding" logic. The humor of the scene stems from Vizzini's solipsitic outsmarting of himself.
I think most of the publication that came from this literary/cultural movement should be perceived as we are supposed to perceive Vizzini. The character died because he was so enamoured with his own ability to "talk smart" that he lost sight of the original problem.
I remember reading the article /. is pointing out here a long time ago (this may be a dupe). The points made about the self-containment of the Humanities' academic community are worth as much as Sokal's example. A mutual admiration society whos members compete for the captain's chair in the Flying Wedge of avant garde literary criticism is bound to go a little nuts.
I do wonder sometimes if there was a proofreader for that book and, if so, how many years of rehabilitation he required.
Finnegans wake? Proofreading? The story I remember is that Joyce sent the book off to be retyped with the hope of adding errors that he hadn't thought of himself.
The parent author is very literate and has some interesting ideas, but since s/he exposes an ignorance that is unusual for someone who seems otherwise intelligent, I'll venture that s/he's actually a troll. I'll bite just for fun.
"If language was really so easy to break down, analyse and interpret in a definitive matter, why is it that NLP is still in its infancy...?"
You don't need to be a deconstructionist to parse natural language. NLP is still in its infancy because common sense is often necessary to remove syntactic and semantic ambiguities.
"Science would benefit from the application of deconstruction and any other theory that might help it sort out what it means to claim that something is true, valid or meaningful."
Scientists aren't fools; they understand a theory as an interpretation of evidence, and consciously use the word "true" as a brief way of saying "so likely as to lie beyond the shadow of reasonable doubt." This understanding is the basis of the scientific method and is essential for success in academia (even though silly politics are too).
"Is it possible that there are two versions of science, both true? I suppose. Maybe particle/wave theory is an example. Maybe the controversies in superstring theory are other examples."
No. Wave/Particle duality is part of a single theory that is half wrong when either component is taken away. Controversies in String Theory are aesthetic because all String Theorists agree that future experiments, as difficult as they will be to devise and conduct, are necessary if the theory is to hold water. More generally, in the scientific community all disagreements about a theory are aesthetic: they vanish when the theory is shown to predict the behavior of a system better than the prevailing one.
"language is not capable of specificity"
You can never completely eliminate the possibility of being misinterpreted, but you can get arbitrarily close. In other words, you're theoretically right but practically wrong.
"with jargon, social and cultural perspectives, indeterminacy of the writer and reader, etc, the quest for the grand unified theory is not possible."
Is it possible that your claim is incorrect? If so, then it is possible that "the quest for the grand unified theory" is possible. If it's possible that it's possible, then it's possible. So the remotest possibility of folly renders this claim completely wrong.
If you would argue that this claim must be absolutely correct, you won't get my vote without a fairly rigorous proof.
Instead I'll assume that by "not possible" you mean "highly unlikely". I'll counter that with the observation that misunderstandings in the scientific community are naturally ironed out by the rigor that scientists employ when making their arguments.
In particular, jargon is an important part of that rigor rather than a hindrance to it. I believe it was you who wrote, "Jargon is necessary to identify complex (or specific) ideas in a minimal amount of words/time." (So is language capable of specificity or not?)
Your entire argument is so strongly based on the need to take great care when proclaiming something to be true that I'm surprised you were so bold in this final claim. More than anything else, this is what has me thinking you're a troll.
Alright, I've had my fun. If you meant all of the above sincerely, I apologize for calling you a troll.
I think there a a few important things that the article left out. First, that there are a lot of people in the field of literary criticism who got where they are by parroting famous and respected ideas to students, and by combining famous and respected ideas with gibberish in the papers they write. The presence of vocal, incompetent people is not occupation specific.
I think the second point is a bit more subtle. Deconstruction does not allow us to claim that a text means anything we want it to. Rather, it asserts that the meaning of a text is not determinate. I have a simple example that was given to me in an introductory course long ago:
Take the first sentence of Melville's Moby Dick. "Call me Ishmael." Now, we use the trick that the author of the article explained fairly well. We look at what the sentence implies.
Typically, in normal English, we would not use the imperative form to introduce ourselves to someone. We would say "My name is Robert." Not a command, but a statement of fact. Where do we typically hear the phrase "call me x"? When we've been introduced to someone by a name that they don't want us to use. "My name is Robert, but you can call me Bob."
The simplest reading of the first words of the text imply that the narrator's name is Ishmael. But there's also a little doubt planted in our minds (even if we're not literary critics, I think that this odd construction may cause some curiousity, even subconsciously). The sentence seems to imply two opposite meanings. And this, I think, is an entirely defensible position to take. Melville was an educated man and an experienced author. He had some purpose in phrasing this line of the novel so much differently than common usage would have it said. Whether or not the narrator's name is actually Ishmael is not relevant--what is relevant is that Melville has used a trick of language to introduce some tension to the text.
This does not mean, for example, that we can make use of deconstruction to claim that the text actually means "my dog has no nose" or anything that extravagent. And it doesn't mean that scholars should go out and examine each line of the text looking for contradictions, because they will always be able to conjure something up.
There's a lot more to it than that, of course. And there are a lot of people who study it for years and come out speaking nonsense. Opponents of the theory don't have to invent straw men because there are plenty of absurd people already immersed in the field. But almost all of the opposition that I've heard has taken the same form as this article does, that you can use deconstruction to show that a text means anything, when it just doesn't work that way. All it does is allow you to show that the meaning of a text cannot be fixed to a certain interpretation, that others are also valid.
Deconstruction is a useful tool in literary criticism like a monkey wrench is a useful tool around the house. You don't apply it to every problem you have. But you may find that it comes in handy in specialized instances.
The author has a lot of problems here that have been pointed out several times over, and some good points as well. One thing that seems to completely escape him is that he must apply deconstructionist techniques in order to deconstruct the particular brand of deconstructionism that he has run into. In and of itself, deconstructionism is merely another tool with which a text (yes, it is the accepted term for anything that can be interpreted) can be read (conotatively meaning "interpreted").
Think of it as a sort of reverse engineering. You break something down into component parts and try to find out how it works. One of those component parts is the author. In the case of "JFK was not a homosexual," we need to know how the author feels about the state of homosexuality; if he is homophobic, than I would say yes, it CAN be legitimately interpreted as a statement of superiority of character. It could even be taken as a statement of envy.... in the context of descibing how many women JFK had sex with, for example. However, in the context given, it is little more than a butterfly under glass. Maybe it's useful in trying to understand the author better (why this particular example), particularly in the context of understanding some of his other writing (particularly about JFK or sexuality).
You shouldn't think of deconstruction as masturbatory any more than you should think of grokking a block of code as masturbatory. Yes, it is completely possible for deconstructionist critics to move in circles in never ending battles of who has the most style in presenting their argunments, however, as I have seen pointed out here, this is a lot like obfuscated code contests (yes, both of those are primarily self indulgeant excercises). However, one of the primary reasons why arguments are so often deconstructed is to determine whether or not the person is wrong. If there is an error in logic or in fact (Like a critic making an argument based on Huck and Jim being on the Colorado River in Huckleberry Finn), a deconstruction of the argument is bound to reveal it.
As someone who spent ample amounts of time in both my college's English and Computer Science departments, I am surprised about the misunderstanding that I often here the geek crowd voice about literary/philisophical/theatrical criticism. A good body of such criticism is language based, and shares much in common with Comp. Sci's language and Machine theory.
Anyway, allow me to offer an alternative reading of the reaction to his introduction. The nods he was getting were merely encouragement from an "in-crowd" trying to be polite to an outsider who was trying to fit. The laughter was due to the fact that everyone knew the author was BSing, and when it became apparent that the author knew it too, there was nothing impolite about acknowledging the fact. Of course, to know for sure one way or the other, we would have to ask the attendees, so I suppose we'll just have to live with possible interpretations for the time being.
If the Social Texteditors find my arguments convincing, then why should they be disconcerted simply because I don't?
I understand that a similar stunt was once pulled on a women's studies department with a bogus article about lesbian behavior in sheep.
Background required... Mating behavior in normal sheep is:
- The ram kicks the sheep in the side.
- If the sheep is not in heat, she moves away.
- If the sheep is in heat, she responds by holding still.
- Upon determining that kicking the sheep in the side causes her to hold still, the ram mounts her.
Therefore, if there WERE a lesbian sheep, she would demonstrate her attraction to another sheep by holding still - which would be essentially indistinguishable from disintrest. This would make it VERY difficult to determine whether lesbian sheep actually exist.
So a young lady who was thoroughly fed up with the women's studies department put her tongue firmly in cheek, wrote this up, and submitted it.
Of course the department didn't recognize they were being put on and made quite a big thing about this brilliant paper by their new star student. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
What is this trust in submissions? They are publishing a professional journal and part of the professionalism is reading the submissions and deciding their merit. An editor and publisher is responsible for what they publish. If they get egg on their face, it's their own fault. If they want to be taken seriously, they have to own their work (publishing their journal) and accept all derogations and accolades. So they made a bad call. It does not matter whether the material they published was bogus by intent or error. It is their job to pick the good from the bad.
I drank what? -- Socrates