I’m amazed that this post, five years later, still gets so many comments. (Maybe undergrads are still getting assigned Derrida and getting angry and confused?).

No argument here, but the same could be said of things like morality, ethics, metaphysics, love, and so on. We’re culturally obligated to accept the verbal baggage of any number of nonsensical concepts, and we keep shuffling them around, century after century, pretending the mean things. I like to think of deconstruction as acknowledging this fact by cracking a long-winded inside joke.

That said, the Enlightenment gave us a lot of ideas worth studying seriously. The idea that deconstruction can or should undermine logic and reason is silly. If I have two apples, and Derrida takes them both from me, I aint got no apples left. Logic wins small battles.

Reading this with morning coffee got my brain juices circulating and my mind up to speed. I finally found out what deconstructuralism is, philosophically, but can’t apply it to literature. I thought it was a group of women who denied that men were different from women. After I find out what Modern is, in terms of literature, then I’ll have the meaning to post-Modern. I read p-M applied admiringly to an authoress whom I found trite and silly, wooden and unresponsive. Kind of Danielle Steele with liberal after-effects.

Deconstruction could be a metaphor for particle physics. Tinier and tinier points, and what are they? I wonder which philosophical group would ‘spooky action at a distance’ represent.

Maybe post-Modern will be when they throw all physics theory out and go with strings and balloons.

James, your comment here reads like a bad parody of a creaky pastiche of comments trying to attack “postmodernism” culled from other internet sites. It’s probably not worth even responding to, but I’ve chosen to talk to you because I really want to know: Why so angry, James? Did deconstructionists pee in your coffee?

honestly, try to deconstruct gravity as you jump out of your window!

However, I urge you not to kowtow to the neoliberal/predatory capitalist agenda that says that liberal arts studies must be “useful” or “usable” in terms of their own rubric. This is the biggest mistake that colleges in the US have made over the past two decades. The idea that literary theorists — and what we’re really talking about here are philosophers, by the way, not “literary theorists” — need to dumb down or despecialize their rhetoric so the uneducated and uninformed can “get it” (whatever “it” is) is a false choice, one that helps the neoliberalist capitalist machine control the narrative. These people would never expect an engineer or a computer programmer or (heaven forfend!) a stockbroker to lucidly explain what it is they do so that a child could understand it—the world is far too complex—so why should literary studies be accountable to a different level of scrutiny?

Obviously I realise that there is far more to the study of literature than being able to understand a couple of theories, but the celebrity-like status of a few difficult theorists/intellectuals seems to be partly responsible for the decline we are seeing in the liberal arts. I live in Britain so I don’t know how it is wherever you’re from (I’m presuming the USA) but the value of a higher education over here is becoming the acquisition of skills necessary to work in business or assist large corporations in tax avoidance. The liberal arts are becoming irrelevant in the face of this brutal neoliberalism. The increasing competitive & privatised nature of our universities doesn’t help matters as many are now boosting maths/science/business with huge cuts to the humanities departments.

So I do care about the what the outside world thinks when it affects to such an extent my ability to follow an intellectual passion. Maybe the link is more tenuous than I, in my caffeine-deprived state, believe, but, if the sum total of an academic field is big fancy words about nothing, which is how all this can seem to the ‘uninitiated’, it will certainly not help it’s already financially crippled case. Especially under a Tory government. With all their f*cking prejudices and spin.

I think it’s about time for the obligatory Orwell quote. In ‘Politics and the English Language’ he asserts that clouded speech is “largely the defense of the indefensible”. It seems that, now more than ever, those at the forefront of this field need to make sure that such a quote is not used against them.

I am a pretty loyal Chomsky ditto-head, but I think there’s a lot of value in the po-mos. In fact, it seems that from the generative perspective, it makes perfect sense to believe that some brains mature in ways that make them less able to perceive the world according to the prevailing conventions of language. These people become the poets, novelists, and philosophers. They carve out new languages. It’s a functional necessity for them, and an evolutionary imperative for the species!

Yeah, I think Derrida was largely incoherent, as is–oh, what’s her name–Spivak. Foucault I have an easier time with. But they’re all essentially following in Nietzsche’s footsteps and working out this young language. They’re trying to express concepts that haven’t been fully formulated yet, but the ideas are in there. They’re good ideas. Powerful ideas. That they appear to be nonsensical is, I think, due to the fact that the neural activity needed to develop the concepts are struggling to survive in a hostile climate. Teach every 5 year old about poststructuralism, and I guarantee that the resulting generation will have no problem understanding the grammars of Derrida, and will think we’re silly for not.