See also: -[Feminism]- ("text" in A/H)
See also: [Semiotics]
[Performance Art] (in A/H)
[Derrida's Wager]
[Message]
[Philosophical Concepts]
[Information]
[Content]
[Context]
Jacques Derida
On this page:
{Stuff}
{Feminism}
{Richard Kostelanetz' advante guardes entry on derrida}
{Readings list}
Stuff
See also: {Feminism} (below)
-[Feminism]- ("text" in A/H)
Err, i'll take modernism for $400
and it's the daily double....
Ok, so here we go.
Talking about Derrida though my hat (sort of like
Monty Python's "Sumarise Proust" contest).
(and believe me i'm NO expert on this... but
see Richard K's comments below)....
First off, Derrida was one of the most advanced
and abstract thinkers of *any* century - so trying
to figure him out is a bit like delving into the
Pensieve of Leonardo's mind...
First off, he was trying to come to grips with
how we talk about ideas. As such, he realised
several things (i think):
1) In order to talk about things, we need
to use words - and they are in-herently
mis-used, un-reliable, and of course
infinitely maleable (just look at poetry,
or set/acting directions, etc).
2) Logic is no better. With Kurt Goedel's
discovery that almost EVERY system of
logic has within it the very tools to
destroy or at least leave un-answered
questions and concepts within it and
of course Bertrand Russell's "paradox"
(two catalogs: one containing all
sets that contain themselves and one
that contains sets that do NOT contain
themselves - but the two catalogs them
selves ARE also sets: Where to put them?)
Even simple systems fall apart!!
3) World War I - the war to end all wars,
"The Great War" -- and
it essentailly accomplished nothing
(so concluded many people including
the Dada'ist's and the "Cuttle Fish
Bones" poets (see, Eugenio Montale,
the proto-absurdists esp German
Realists/Expressions around 1910),
etc:
WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN????
And along comes Derrida the young philosophy
and literature student:
How can we talk about ANYTHING?
How can we make sense of the world?
How do we escape our own cultural biases?
etc.
What happened was several fold:
1) If every text of "sufficient length"
contains every other text; eg, a dictionary
contains every possible text that can be
written in that dictionary's language. See
also, "The Library of Babel" and "Tlon" by
Jorge Luis Borges. One can argue that
"the bible contains the torah", or that
"the koran contains the tao", etc. -- most
religious zealots would hate this.
2) What about the rights of women and other
"minorities"? The entire edu / intellectual
process - read that as "western reductionist
philosophy" -- likes to "grind things up".
That is once we can classify, type-ify, and
LABEL everything then we KNOW everything
about it!!! (yeah, right) see:
"World as Laboratory" by Rebecca Lemov
"The MisMeasure of Man" by Stephen J. Gould
"The MisMeasure of Woman" by Carol Tavris
3) Depending on what we are looking at and how we
are studying it will affect it - no matter how
we try to "distance" our self from it. The
philosophical, cultural, and historical
implications of things like the Relativity
and Uncertainty theories of physics, Evolution,
Freud's and other modern anthropologists and
such, and, etc, etc, etd.
But, mainly Derrida realised that he was trying to
use the very western reductionist process (language,
modal logic, selected facts, ways of seeing things,
etc) to ATTACK the system which he found wanting.
In a way, he was the first *literary* person to
realise that art and literature often gave us a
deeper insight into the world around us - and many
times they were FICTION.
It's as if the MAIN text is some-how pure and
perfect, but then of course it's ALWAYS in a
CONTEXT. Thus, Derrida would look at the
footnotes; ie, the hidden assumptions, cultural
background, etc. And then he pursued these threads
to find (or to show that one could NOT find) an
ultimate truth. That is, to distill down each
and every sentence of a text, its meanings, and
implications that somehow we would arrive at
NOTHING. That is, the western reductionist ideas
were at the mercy of their own grammar, perfection
of literary style, analysis, historical methods,
etc.
So, what is the fall-out of it all???
The reacitionary mind uses structuralism to defend
its attacks on feminism, other-genderness, multi-
culturalism, etc. They argue that all of this
attention on minorities under-values the real
accomplishments of modernism.
Eco-radicals, anti-imperialists, and their ilk
respond: And well and good! What has modernism
given us but the de-humanisation of the
individual, destruction of the environmnet,
third-, fourth-, and fifth-world countries
where even decent drinking water is problematic???
And somewhere between those two extremes (presumably)
the truth lies. But, most probably the truth has
always lied, in the end our dreams are the only
reality.
Which of course, brings us back to Plato's Cave
(or "The Matrix"), or "statistics" (and Mark
Twain's comment as to little white lies,
damned lies, and then there's statistics), or
.....
So, a great part of what happened is that all
areas of intellectual pursuit (notably history,
anthropology, psychology, and even the arts)
began to realise that they could were only talking
about what they saw - but, they realised that
they were culturally biased and that they could
only TRY to be impartial.
The implications are things like this:
a) The translation of a poem (the most
difficult form of literature to
"capture") from one language will
always be flawed - but, we must TRY.
b) History doesn't reveal some absolute
truth, but fractions of what was going
on and *hopefully* it will give us
insight into our here and now.
c) Psychology has no silver bullets - the
mind is not some programable computer,
nor is it totally mysterious.
And so forth. One aspect is that it is the
attention and importance that each of us
chooses to attach to our own existence that
gives it meaning. For many people, such power
is a bit frightening - and so they cling to
the old power structures and "beliefs".
Examples of this common wisdom (if we can
really call it that) are:
The Beatles destroyed American music,
and Yoko Onno destroyed the Beatles.
Historians should just tell the FACTS.
Things are going down hill.
Conservatives are trying to saved the
country, the Liberals are trying to
destroy it.
It's all some "Pleasantville" form of facism
if you ask me. Oh, sorry, just really tired....
Conclusions?
============
In the end, human decency (towards each other
and other creatures on earth) is about all that
i can see as the saving grace of humans. Well,
that and polytonic music, virtual reality, and
of course ducks.
NOTE: No philosophers, poets, conservatives,
radicals, iconospheres, or ducks (or
other aquatic or shore fowl) were harmed
in the production of this post.
--42--
frank.
>h2>Feminism
See also: -[Feminism]- ("text" in A/H)
Note these are my notes/thoughts on "Feminism"
as seen via a glass-Derrida; as such they should
be taken with a grain of salt, two jiggers of
gin, and a "certain" duck's comment on whether and
weather or not.
THE HANDMAID'S TALE BY MARGARET ATWOOD
Question: QUESTION: Hello Sir!
Could you talk to me about the structure and narratorial tendencies of Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" ? i am trying to study this text in the Derridean light (Jacques Derrida's theory) i am not sure i can dissect the structure of the novel with ease and with the required technical knowledge..i have simply noticed that it is in keeping with the post-modernist novels and that the text has a kind of metanarrative...but am not too sure i have used to appropriate terms even here...
I would indeed be very grateful if you could help me...
ANSWER: this-file: frhl-experts-derrida-atwood-and-maden
(also, please excuse the lateness of this reply :(
I'm sorry to say that (despite "having heard of")
the book, i've not read it - alas i can't find it
here locally at the used book shops.
But.
I have seen a film "slightly based" on it.
And as regards how one should proceed in a Derridian
manner - i'm quite the in-expert here -- i might
recommend the following:
1) Husserl and others (constructivists - and PLEASE
don't make the mistake i did of confusing the
Russian construcivst ART movment and things like
"Suppremacist" with racism, nazzism, etc. and
the constructionists (litarery movement) and
of course de-constructionists, etc.
Anyway, it's pretty clear (or at least arguable)
that people like him and Freud have "some sort"
of problem with women. I think that (as an artist)
we might say the following:
What happened after World War I
and what impacted Dada and
other absurdist thinking was
that Darwin had dared to tell
us that we were animals, and
that Freud told us that we
weren't even *rational* animals.
However, as when Freud met
[Salvidor] Dali, he is supposed
to have commented that it was
clear that he [(Dali)] was pretty
much in contact with his sub-conscious
and as such didn't need
[psycho-]analysis.
So the first part is to examine in "literary style"
how construction, de-construction, and modern
thought view "feminism" and of course the WORK
at hand; ie, Atwood's "A HandMaid's Tale" ??title??
By the way (btw), the reason that i bring feminism
into this is that it deals with a woman who
is having to live her life through men - a key
objection by feminists. The classic phrase was
"A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."
Of course, often anti-feminists judge all feminists
to be anti-male womyn - note the spellings.
As with all art work, we have to speak to the object
itself. That is (in the case of text) what is she
saying, how is she saying it, and what are her
possible motivations for the work? We have a
tendency to fall into what in art criticism is
called the "intentionalist falacy". That is,
that if we look at a work, we can figure out
FROM the work, what the artist's intentions were.
In reality, and in many cases, all we have IS
the work. And without CONTEXT (never forget
Umberto Eco's axiom: "Context is king"), we
are likely to go astray. In many of the
upper-renaissance paintings, you see picture
of a dog. What the phote? is that doing there?
A dog was a SYMBOL in that style (notably the
so-called "Flemish Masters" for LOYALTY. Ah,
now the nickle drops (ie, the motivation,
the under-laying sub-text, etc).
2) Once you begin to "cut up" the work and
put parts of it (like some Alien Autopsy
in Area 51 at Rosswell) one "table" or
another - ie, constructionsit/de-constructionist,
literary criticsm, Derridian analysis,
feminism, or "it's just a story!!!!"
This allows you to almost atomically
look at each element of the work.
THis is both a constructivist/de-constructionist
POV (Point of view). But, with the idea
that the "map is not the territory"
the sum of the parts is greater than
the whole - and other tauist mumblings
that i might personally make.
Don't forget things like:
The Feminist Mystique
Mother of all things
Woman as nurturer
etc
-- ie, classic "texts" as to the role of women.
This last was a response (as i recall)
by Willem de Kooning when someone was trying
to de-construct one of Framk Stella's
"protractor" minimalist paintings,
"It's just paint and canvas!".
Again, what you want to do here (or at least
the one way that i try to get to it) is to:
1) Draw parallels when possible. How is this
work like others of its kind.
2) Try to "judge" the work in its actual
context and period and style of the
author of the work. You may want to
see when the work was written, what
was going on in her life, etc - all
attempting to find out the *intent*
of the workd.
3) Study *historical* info about the
work. Always difficult: Something
written at a certain time tends
to be clumped with other things.
Again, the CONTEXT of the work
is not the TIME or SPACE in which
that work is written. A dog in
a Flemish painting is a SYMBOL
and has nothing to do with
hunting, animal husbandry, etc.
3) Be direct! Let your voice be heard. You are
the author of the work about a work. Yes,
i know this is the WORST advice that i can
give you: I don't think i'll ever get an
"A" on these types of projects, simply because
i refuse to go quietly into that night.
(Dylan Thomas poem ref)
One thing i like to do (to survive in the
- i think overly-pompous world of the
"literati" and the "intelligencia") is
to use the word "reducx" as the last
section of each topic i'm discussing.
That is, put into how i'm thinking and
seeing what i'm learning, finding out,
and (hopefully) being changed by as the
process goes forward.
Here is a copy of my one "great" paper
that i did for an anthropology class,
hope it would help - make sure you do
a beter job with the Bibliography than
i did.
http://art-squeek.angelfire.com/thru-a-ritual-darkly.doc
Well, that's pretty much all i know on the mechanics
of doing something like this.
Good luck and if you need, please rsvp.
- Frank.
ps: I could see this evolving into a major paper for
you.
************** here are some supplementary notes that
i have written. hope they help.
(this is sort of asking someone what the play
"Hamlet" is about. As one of my theatre profs
put it: Until you can state in one sentence
what ANYTHING is about, then you'll have
trouble finding the centre of the work:
"Hamlet is a play about a young man
who's is killed by his uncle and
he seeks revenge" -- not an exact quote.
......
My notes are "in flux" as i'm having to
shuffle things around on my various web sites...
My main project is an "art history book"
via:
http://art-squeek.angelfire.com
http://art-squeek.angelfire.com/ah/ah-index.html
But that single project has grown, so i've had
to create a separate site for it:
https://mm-art-history.angelfire.com/ah/ah-index.html
("mm" refers to Professors Mgoniggle and Mills who
first tried to teach ME what art history is)
For the moment, the "most complete and up-to-date"
versions of files you might find usefull are on
my "professional artist" site (what ever *that* means ;)
http://art-squeek.angelfire.com/ah/ah-index.html
http://art-squeek.angelfire.com/philo/derrida-jacques.html
http://art-squeek.angelfire.com/ah/feminism.html
(as with most of my work, it's always "in progress")
Onward! Into the fog!
******** BEGIN NOTES on Derrida (in progress as with all things ;)
Hmmm, nothing like an easy question, huh?
Err, i'll take modernism for $400
and it's the daily double....
Ok, so here we go.
Talking about Derrida though my hat (sort of like
Monty Python's "Sumarise Proust" contest).
(and believe me i'm NO expert on this... but
see Richard K's comments below)....
First off, Derrida was one of the most advanced
and abstract thinkers of *any* century - so trying
to figure him out is a bit like delving into the
Pensieve of Leonardo's mind...
First off, he was trying to come to grips with
how we talk about ideas. As such, he realised
several things (i think):
1) In order to talk about things, we need
to use words - and they are in-herently
mis-used, un-reliable, and of course
infinitely maleable (just look at poetry,
or set/acting directions, etc).
2) Logic is no better. With Kurt Goedel's
discovery that almost EVERY system of
logic has within it the very tools to
destroy or at least leave un-answered
questions and concepts within it and
of course Bertrand Russell's "paradox"
(two catalogs: one containing all
sets that contain themselves and one
that contains sets that do NOT contain
themselves - but the two catalogs them
selves ARE also sets: Where to put them?)
Even simple systems fall apart!!
3) World War I - the war to end all wars,
"The Great War" -- and
it essentailly accomplished nothing
(so concluded many people including
the Dada'ist's and the "Cuttle Fish
Bones" poets (see, Eugenio Montale,
the proto-absurdists esp German
Realists/Expressions around 1910),
etc:
WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN????
And along comes Derrida the young philosophy
and literature student:
How can we talk about ANYTHING?
How can we make sense of the world?
How do we escape our own cultural biases?
etc.
What happened was several fold:
1) If every text of "sufficient length"
contains every other text; eg, a dictionary
contains every possible text that can be
written in that dictionary's language. See
also, "The Library of Babel" and "Tlon" by
Jorge Luis Borges. One can argue that
"the bible contains the torah", or that
"the koran contains the tao", etc. -- most
religious zealots would hate this.
2) What about the rights of women and other
"minorities"? The entire edu / intellectual
process - read that as "western reductionist
philosophy" -- likes to "grind things up".
That is once we can classify, type-ify, and
LABEL everything then we KNOW everything
about it!!! (yeah, right) see:
"World as Laboratory" by Rebecca Lemov
"The MisMeasure of Man" by Stephen J. Gould
"The MisMeasure of Woman" by Carol Tavris
3) Depending on what we are looking at and how we
are studying it will affect it - no matter how
we try to "distance" our self from it. The
philosophical, cultural, and historical
implications of things like the Relativity
and Uncertainty theories of physics, Evolution,
Freud's and other modern anthropologists and
such, and, etc, etc, etd.
But, mainly Derrida realised that he was trying to
use the very western reductionist process (language,
modal logic, selected facts, ways of seeing things,
etc) to ATTACK the system which he found wanting.
In a way, he was the first *literary* person to
realise that art and literature often gave us a
deeper insight into the world around us - and many
times they were FICTION.
It's as if the MAIN text is some-how pure and
perfect, but then of course it's ALWAYS in a
CONTEXT. Thus, Derrida would look at the
footnotes; ie, the hidden assumptions, cultural
background, etc. And then he pursued these threads
to find (or to show that one could NOT find) an
ultimate truth. That is, to distill down each
and every sentence of a text, its meanings, and
implications that somehow we would arrive at
NOTHING. That is, the western reductionist ideas
were at the mercy of their own grammar, perfection
of literary style, analysis, historical methods,
etc.
So, what is the fall-out of it all???
The reacitionary mind uses structuralism to defend
its attacks on feminism, other-genderness, multi-
culturalism, etc. They argue that all of this
attention on minorities under-values the real
accomplishments of modernism.
Eco-radicals, anti-imperialists, and their ilk
respond: And well and good! What has modernism
given us but the de-humanisation of the
individual, destruction of the environmnet,
third-, fourth-, and fifth-world countries
where even decent drinking water is problematic???
And somewhere between those two extremes (presumably)
the truth lies. But, most probably the truth has
always lied, in the end our dreams are the only
reality.
Which of course, brings us back to Plato's Cave
(or "The Matrix"), or "statistics" (and Mark
Twain's comment as to little white lies,
damned lies, and then there's statistics), or
.....
So, a great part of what happened is that all
areas of intellectual pursuit (notably history,
anthropology, psychology, and even the arts)
began to realise that they could were only talking
about what they saw - but, they realised that
they were culturally biased and that they could
only TRY to be impartial.
The implications are things like this:
a) The translation of a poem (the most
difficult form of literature to
"capture") from one language will
always be flawed - but, we must TRY.
b) History doesn't reveal some absolute
truth, but fractions of what was going
on and *hopefully* it will give us
insight into our here and now.
c) Psychology has no silver bullets - the
mind is not some programable computer,
nor is it totally mysterious.
And so forth. One aspect is that it is the
attention and importance that each of us
chooses to attach to our own existence that
gives it meaning. For many people, such power
is a bit frightening - and so they cling to
the old power structures and "beliefs".
Examples of this common wisdom (if we can
really call it that) are:
The Beatles destroyed American music,
and Yoko Onno destroyed the Beatles.
Historians should just tell the FACTS.
Things are going down hill.
Conservatives are trying to saved the
country, the Liberals are trying to
destroy it.
It's all some "Pleasantville" form of facism
if you ask me. Oh, sorry, just really tired....
Conclusions?
============
In the end, human decency (towards each other
and other creatures on earth) is about all that
i can see as the saving grace of humans. Well,
that and polytonic music, virtual reality, and
of course ducks.
NOTE: No philosophers, poets, conservatives,
radicals, iconospheres, or ducks (or
other aquatic or shore fowl) were harmed
in the production of this post.
--42--
frank.
ps: Mostly, i don't think that anyone *really* understands all of
this, but then i'm just a crazy artist anyway ;)
****************** BONUS TRACK ******************
In his superb book "Dictionary of the Avante Guardes",
Richard Kostelanetz....
"A Frenchman from North Africa, Derida has become some academic
literary circles the most influential critical theorist since Northrop Frye.
His books seem designed for the classroom, which means that
they are most successfully read with a guide, in concert with other
seekers. Where they are comprehensible, at least in my experience,
the ideas are obvious; where they are in-comprehensible, Derrida's
theories of deconstruction offers the cognoscenti
rich opportunities for the kinds of one-ups-man-ship endemic to
such hierarchical societies as the military and most universities.
"To my mind, Derrida's originality comes from his way of thinking,
which I discovered not from reading his works, but from hearing
him speak. In Jerusalem, several years ago, I witnessed a question/
answer performance before a mostly academic audience, mostly
speaking, as he, non-native English. Whenever Derrida took a
question, you could see him fumble for the beginnings of an answer,
but once he got on track, an elaborate digression followe, at once
elegant and idiosyncratic, until he reached a pause. Having followed
him so far, you wondered whether he would then turn to the left
or to the right, each direction seeming equally vaid, only to admire
the next verbal flight that led to another roadstop, with similarly
arbitrary choices before continuing or concluding. In response to
the next question, Derrida improvised structurally similar rhetorical
gymnnastics.
"What separates Derrida from tradtional literary theorists is this
commitment to improvisitory thinking with all of its possibilities
and limitations. Should you have a taste for high-flown intellectual
gymnastics, consider Marshall McLuhan, whose
similarly improvised perceptions were sociologically more substantial.
"If you think improvisation is "no way to play music", you might judge that Derrida's example is no way to think."
[Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes", P.58.]
******************* REFS and READING ***********************
Refs: McLuhan, "Understanding Media"
and "THe Medium is the Massage"
(the last is a play on his idea that the
"The medium IS the message"
also look for:
"Literary Theory" by Terry Eagleton
"Mapping the Terrain" ed by Suzzane Lacxy
"I Seem to be a Verb" by R. Buckminister Fuller
"The End of the Art World" by Robert C. Morgan
and a true classic: Criticism since Plato.
anything by Neil Postman, Pagtricia Leighton, or
Robert Hughes is good - a bit opiniated but def a good thinker
---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------
QUESTION: Thank you very much Sir! This is not so much a question as an acknowledgment:)
Out of a list of questions i chose to write my paper on Margaret Atwood's text and apply Derrida's concepts to it...This paper is important to me not so much in terms of marks (its weightage is very minimal :) ) as in terms of my own interest:)
I was, however, assailed with doubt when i started delving into Derrida's concepts...i was really unsure whether i was understanding correctly or not...many of his concepts seemed to echo Roland Barthes' concept of 'Death of The Author' and Ferdinan Saussure...as well...
So i thank you sincerely for having devoted so much time to help me!!
Answer: Don't forget that Derrida was (at the heart, i think) questining the entiore business of divorcing the text from the narrative and "dicing itinto symbools, language, and some absolute story".
Inb one sense it does go back to the writer's guide "Thw Twenty Master Plots and How to Write Them", that there are onlyh a certain number of actrually different stories. But, as most writers say the difference is in all of the little details along the way.
One of my fav examples is:
The narrative is: The QUeen died, and then the King died.
The STROY is: The QUeen died, and then the King died of a broken heart."
-- i can't for the life of me find where that came up.
Another author to check out os Jameson who's considered a great post-moderenst writer about modernist-writers and their ilk.
good luck,
frank
Richard K. sez...
In his superb book "Dictionary of the Avante Guardes", Richard
Kostelanetz sez:
"A Frenchman from North Africa, Derida has become some academic
literary circles the most influential critical theorist since Northrop Frye.
His books seem designed for the classroom, which means that
they are most successfully read with a guide, in concert with other
seekers. Where they are comprehensible, at least in my experience,
the ideas are obvious; where they are in-comprehensible, Derrida's
theories of deconstruction offers the cognoscenti
rich opportunities for the kinds of one-ups-man-ship endemic to
such hierarchical societies as the military and most universities.
"To my mind, Derrida's originality comes from his way of thinking,
which I discovered not from reading his works, but from hearing
him speak. In Jerusalem, several years ago, I witnessed a question/
answer performance before a mostly academic audience, mostly
speaking, as he, non-native English. Whenever Derrida took a
question, you could see him fumble for the beginnings of an answer,
but once he got on track, an elaborate digression followe, at once
elegant and idiosyncratic, until he reached a pause. Having followed
him so far, you wondered whether he would then turn to the left
or to the right, each direction seeming equally vaid, only to admire
the next verbal flight that led to another roadstop, with similarly
arbitrary choices before continuing or concluding. In response to
the next question, Derrida improvised structurally similar rhetorical
gymnnastics.
"What separates Derrida from tradtional literary theorists is this
commitment to improvisitory thinking with all of its possibilities
and limitations. Shoul you have a taste for high-flown intellectual
gymnastics, consider Marshall McLuhan, whose
similarly improvised perceptions were sociologically more substantial.
"If you think improvisation is "no way to play music", you might judge
that Derrida's example is no way to think."
[Dictionary of the Avant-Gardes", P.58.]
btw: I typed this in while listening to Frank Zappa's "Hot Rats" alb,
a subj btw which Kostz. cvers in his bk; ie, F.Z.
[Back to the TOP of this page}
Readings
"Points...; interviews, 1974-1994", edited by Elisabeth Weber,
translated by Peggy Kamuf & others. (here is *exactly* where
an excelent 'et al' could have been used!).
ISBN 0.8047.2488.1 (California, 1992). (Yes, i know that
the dates '1994' and '1992' "don't match"; go figure).
