Writing

I spent most of today writing up my Nussbaum/Sloterdijk/Ulmer/SF Zero article, turning handwritten rough draft into (sloppily) typed rough draft. A fun process. Essentially, I critique Nussbaum's connection between critical thinking and empathy, and argue instead for a post-pedagogical, non-critical, self-explorative thinking alongside a call for local action. More on this to come.

A colleague stepped in and returned a book he borrowed last year--Mark C. Taylor's Moment of Complexity. Flipping through the pages, I came to a passage that rifted nicely with my writing; Taylor:

Through his deconstructive analyses, Derrida attempts to disrupt digital technologies and the systems they produce by turning the digital divide into a rupture that can never be overcome. However, his critique is, in the final analysis, ineffective: deconstruction changes nothing. While exposing systems and structures as incomplete and perhaps repressive, deconstruction inevitably leaves them in place. This is not merely because deconstruction involves theoretical analyses instead of practical action but also because of the specific conclusions reached by the theoretical critique. Instead of showing how totalizing structures can actually be changed, deconstruction demonstrates that the tendency to totalize can never be overcome, and, thus, that repressive structures are inescapable. For Derrida and his followers, all we can do is to join in the Sisyphean struggle to undo what cannot be done. (65)

Essentially, I accuse Nussbaum of something similar to what Taylor accuses Derrida--of a kind of navel-gazing philosophy that does not adequately address the complications of real world change. I do think Taylor is intentionally under-reading (is that a thing?) Derrida here in order to set up his later articulation of complexity (one that draws quite heavily on this "useless" deconstruction). Deconstruction, I think, can suggest to us the necessity of approaching change on a local and concrete level--it is not necessarily inevitable that we leave structures in place.

Deconstruction, Responsibility, and Greek-Europeans

Thanks Casey--I have a sneaking suspicion that when it comes to books, we have divergent tastes. When it comes to teaching, we share quite a lot. Like my last post, this started as a comment and grew into a long one.

The early/late Derrida question is quite the question--whether his entire opus is oriented toward ethics or whether this marks a significant turn in the later works. Personally, I think he was always concerned with ethics--but early in this career he was more interested in destruction (because that high tower had grown so high and presented itself as impervious to critique) and later in his career much more interested in construction (since he had pretty much succeeded with objective #1). Its also important to remember that the anthologized stuff in America primarily deals with literature and language, and tends to pass over elements of the early work invested in metaphysics. To simplify, Derrida's career can be read as a tension between Heidegger's poetics and Levinas's ethics--he starts closer to the former and ends closer to the latter.

In Learning to Live Finally, his last interview before his death, Derrida shares a very candid and lucid (wait, Derrida, lucid--yes!) depiction of deconstruction. Its pretty long, but here we go:

Deconstruction in general is an undertaking that many have considered, and rightly so, to be a gesture of suspicion with regard to all Eurocentrism. When more recently I have had occasion to say "we Europeans" is is something quite different and is always related to a particular set of circumstances: everything that can be deconstructed in the European tradition does not negate the possibility--and precisely because of what has happened in Europe, because of the Enlightenment, because of the shrinking of this little continent and the enormous guilt that pervades its culture (totalitarianism, Nazism, fascism, genocides, Shoah, colonization and decolonization, etc.)--that today, in the geopolitical situation in which we find ourselves, Europe, an other Europe but with the same memory might (this is in any case my wish) band together against both the politics of American hegemony (in the configuration of Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfield and so on) and an Arab-Islamic theocratism without Enlightenment and without political future (though let's not minimize contradictions, the processes underway, and the heterogeneities within these two groups, and let us join forces with those who resist from within these two blocs). Europe finds itself under the injunction to assume a new responsibility. (40-41)

Derrida locates this new responsibility in Kant's original "hesitant" Enlightenment--this is something one of my graduate students, Adam Breckenridge, pointed out in my Contemporary Rhetorics seminar--that Kant's original work was suspicious of meta-narratives much more than many postmodern theorists have been (and thus, postmodern theory, very much against some wills, transformed into its own monolith resistant to critique through its presumed attention to foundations... have I heard this line before? It is possible to be a bad anti-foundationalist--bad in this sense would not only indicate a sole commitment to destruciton, but also a lack of self-reflexivity).

Speaking toward a Kantian inspired geo-cosmopolitanism (one dedicated to the planet and not the nation as polis), Derrida writes:

What I call "deconstruction," even when it is directed toward something from Europe, is European; it is a product of Europe, a relation of Europe to itself as an experience of radical alterity. Since the time of the Enlightenment, Europe has undertaken a perpetual self-critique, and in this perfectible heritage there is a chance for a future. At least I would like to hope so, and that is what feeds my indignation when I hear people definitively condemning Europe as if it were but the scene of its crimes. (44-45)

There is a small strain of optimism here that recalls for me Kant's conclusion to "What is Enlightenment?": "If only they refrain from inventing artifices to keep themselves in it, men will gradually raise themselves from barbarism." Notice Kant doesn't say "reach Enlightenment." He's aiming low. Given humanity's track record, that's probably high enough.

Finally, I should address all this talk of Europe--I hear it ring with an echo of "Greece"; we are all still European (to what extent is debatable) just as we are still Greek, still Roman. Not all of us, for sure. And we are more than just Greek, just Roman. But these are the times (more than even places) from which our values were drawn, the heart of our cultural, political, and legal landscape. Those veins still pump. There resonances heard in the walls of our institutions.

But I am especially rooted in Europe (never mind that I was born in bred in Plymouth, MA--the self-proclaimed birthplace of America proud to have help kill the Red Coats). I have mentioned, from time to time, that the Holocaust remains the single event that motivated my entry into scholarship. Everything I have written lies in its shadow. It haunts me with questions: why, how, when? It is this last question in particular that haunts me--when might it return. We know that genocide has surfaced in other places in the 20th century. I find it impossible to think such hatred. It is the face of the other for me-I cannot totalize it, understand it, come to terms with it. I quake thinking about it. And so I do the only thing I know how to do. I read. I think. I write. I question. I teach. I wait. I listen.

Practicing Deconstruction Responsibly

I think deconstruction, when practiced well, is both destruction and construction. Derrida's later work provides numerous examples of such positive practice. But this would just get us into a tired, commonplace exchange.

In terms of changing the University, I am quite concerned about the increase of standardization, particularly in terms of assessment. I told my class Tuesday night that assessment is becoming the new "excellence" (in Bill Readings' very particular conception of the term). This might not be the case for you, since you work at a small, private school.

But Florida is a bureaucratic nightmare (I've been trying to get a course approved for two years! Its on committee 3 of 6. That is not an exaggeration). Additionally, the administration is calling for rubrics to assess all classes and levels of instruction; they want us to demonstrate "inter-relator reliability" for dissertations. We try to explain that this is near impossible: on the last round of PhD exams, for instance, I am the only person really qualified to assess the quality of a classical response; the other people on the committee specialized in composition theory. And I had to spend a week reading up on the student's list so I could evaluate the quality of the responses.

No matter how hard we try to explain the narrowness of our specializations, they just frown at the deviations in our numbers. No matter how much we argue that our work is aesthetic and indeterminate, they expect evaluation to operate according to definitive measures. It gets frustrating.

But that's how I am practicing deconstruction here, by identifying the presupposition that grounds "assessment as excellence." Those grounds are that aesthetic disciplines can be quantitatively measured. Elements of these disciplines can be--but ultimately I believe we teach processes of engagement more than we teach products of knowledge. I might be in the minority on such a position, but I don't think so. Note--there's nothing wrong with assessment, nor could a University likely operate without it, but there's assessment as operation and then assessment as meta-narrative. There is no absolute, determinate line between the former and the latter. To honor such indeterminacy, we need to keep attending to where that line might be (keep it in language so that it keeps moving in the fore ground, so that we are aware of its stake as a grund).

Such deconstruction (as challenge) does risk defacing my commitment to Levinas's ethics--but I challenge the other in this case out of defense for an other other (a neighbor), my students. My primary commitment is in providing them the best education possible, and I believe the best education is one that responds (holds itself responsible) to the students--providing them the most paths, the most freedom to develop. I don't think the emphasis on standardized outcomes does this. In fact, I think it is a violent reduction of pedagogical possibilities. That's why, as I concluded in my previous post, I am willing to fight. But I also try to keep my argument as open to the other as possible--recognizing the legitimacy of their mission, recognizing that it might be quite applicable for others, recognizing that I cannot with assurance dismiss their claims. I am willing to discuss. As I describe Levinas--I am trying to create a mood, a disposition, out of which a positive exchange could take place.

On another note, I'm looking forward to picking up Nussbaum's book, Not-for-Profit as the reviews I've read (from a variety of perspectives) seem to be quite positive. I think they will support my preference for skills based conception of the humanities. I quibbled with Nussbaum's conception of "world citizens" as a grad student, since it seems to replicate a homogenizing cosmopolitanism and re-centers the human in first position (I would prefer instead "citizens of the world," which holds out for the possibility that the world is larger than the people on it). Regardless, I believe Nussbaum's Socratic/deconstructive interrogation of the Humanities early 21st century travails will attract attention. And these days, attention is everything, right?