Nope. If you had belonged to any discipline involving textual interpretation, and hence valorizing attention to the actual interpretation of textual contents as “evidence”, rather than assuming the “privilege” of the a priori imposition of “models”, your efforts would have gotten and deserved an “F”,- or, at best, a “D-” on account of your enthusiasm. Not even Jacques Derrida would have leapt so wildly over not just textual contents and modes, but 18+ centuries of cultural and material history. The least you could have done to make your case would have been to reference Karl Loewith’s neat little book on the Western conception of history as a secularization of Judeo-Christian eschatology. But then the same would have applied to your high-flying, Whiggish account of a continuity of material progress, despite all contingencies and geographical variations, due to the miracle of markets, as to the historical projections of Marx. Leaving aside the attention that the Gospel notion of “kairos” as the temporal gathering of a “moment of vision” has received in Western philosophical reflection, the really fun part was your claim that Marx was aiming at an instantaneous moment of transformation whereby all tears would be abolished. Which tears? Those of mourning, bitterness, relief, joy, laughter, compassion? Only someone singularly inattentive not just to texts, but to meaning and its contexts would stolidly make such an astonishing claim.

Yes, the interpolation by another commenter of the Wallerstein citation was a bit off topic, (though Holbo’s response to Lamont’s concerns was also a bit of topic, and so it goes with internet posts and discussions, especially at the end of such threads, which is part of their “charm”). But then the semantic variability of terms, if not their instability and contradictoriness, is at least an off-shoot of the issues on this thread. It was John Austin who remarked that when someone speaks of “democracy” it is never quite clear what is meant. (Though that might have been just a piece of donnish liberalism). “Liberalism” has a variety of uses, and perhaps the economic kind, indicating an endorsement of “free” markets as the most desirable key to social organization should be distinguished from the political meanings, as concerned with the articulation of individual rights over against the potential or actual oppressive power of the state. But, historically, the two were conjoined in a common ideological node, emphasizing the freedom of individuals over against collective oppressions, in which the equality of freedoms was to be upheld against any requirements of collective existence or action, and a harmonization of all values and interests, on the basis of individuality, was to be the prevailing vision of extant reality. I.e. freedom took priority over equality and individual rights over the requirements of common existence, though it’s never been clear, to me at least, just how freedom is to be “measured” so as to be an “equal” quantity, and how individual right should be declared, directly and without conflict or contradictions, “universal”. On the other hand, if “individuals” only exist through their participation in communities, if “rights” are a collective legal institution, dependent on some power of their enforcement, and “equality” is referred to the pattern and stratification of social exchanges, then a simple “logical” identity between freedom and equality, tout court, as an unquestionable fundament of political reasonings and actions becomes problematic. But then “freedom”, i.e. human agency, is not just an immediately appealing facticity, but, upon reflection, a limited and finite “thing”, one bound up in relations with others, who are equally, indeterminately, and finitely “free”. And the counterpoint, the doppelgaenger, of human freedom is always power: how it is collectively generated, gathered together and concentrated , and distributed. Hence the political realm, (however underpinned by economic interests and structurings), concerns the public-political generation of power and its distributions: just “who” belongs to the political community (and who is excluded), how freedoms and rights are distributed, and who or what is to determine the collective ends of common projects or actions. The political realm, then, is pre-eminently one of alienation, of passing-over into otherness, of existing in community with others, who are utterly unlike oneself in values, interests or practical orientations, since political participation involves rising above one’s particular egoistic interests and values and presenting one’s viewpoint in terms of the “universal” common good or collective public interest. Which abstraction is always also hypocritical, so the political realm is liable to seem not just alienated, but corrupt, as well. So there should be little wonder over the instabilities or conflictual understandings of terms, which stipulative definition could not quite cure.

The A. France quip was less a sophistry than a sardonic observation, since who exactly gets to determine which pieces of rhetoric, an unavoidable condition of political speech- or any-, are sophistries, and which belong to unconditional truth? Though the example of “gay rights” is not a particularly good historical transposition, since, in my book at least, that is a matter of private or, at most, civic rights, and not a public-political issue. (I’m certainly not opposed to equal legal-contractual rights for gays, but I find tropes like “gay marriage” sentimental and reactionary). But the Wallerstein citation clearly was aimed at the politico-economic ideology of neo-liberalism, and concerned itself in an international perspective with the inequality and “democratic” deficit between as much as within nations, proposing a transnational generation of a countervailing “democratic” public sphere. But then what it was proposing was all too “vague”.

Let the record show that you were claiming that there were no “connections or analogies” between John of Patmos’s and Karl of Trier’s descriptions of the cataclysm and then the descent from the skies of the New Jerusalem. That does strike me as profoundly stupid: almost all people can recognize “connections or analogies” between one piece of Holy Writ and another piece of Holy Writ…

No, but such sophistical arguments (e.g. “Heterosexual and homosexual men are both equally free to marry women, so there’s no discrimination here” – to translate France’s famous quip into the terms of a contemporary political controversy) are rarely associated with liberals, as the term is contemporarily used. So I think that to call that a critique of liberalism requires ignoring the modern meaning of “liberal” (unless, of course, it’s a historical quote predating the meaning shift, but I assumed from the discussion of postmodernism that it was relatively recent).

It’s difficult to engage with a view that liberals are engaged in a struggle against a “reality of increasing equality and democracy” unless you know what the author means by “liberals”.

But it now seems like a big irrelevant distraction from the thread that I probably shouldn’t have bothered with. (Unless it somehow illustrates the underlying point in a way too subtle for me to put into words right now… how would Wallerstein react to someone asking him to define his terms before proceeding?)

It expresses something pretty close to my own view about the inadequacies of Derrida’s approach (which won’t work unless the victim agrees to stand on the big red X, which is obviously a trapdoor – that is, it’s an obvious false dichotomy or otherwise dubiously Platonic something-or-other.) More generally, Wheeler’s formulation is actually a pretty good statement of what I take to be my overall anti-Theory strategy, in (for example) my good old mock-Platonic dialogue. It turns out that my goal in life is to be a conservative deconstructor of Theory, and literary theory more generally, in Wheeler’s sense. So, at any rate, maybe that makes it clearer what I want.

In that old dialogue of mine, without talking about Wittgnestein, I take myself to be doing something Wittgensteinian on two fronts: asking what happens when you take a Wittgensteinian look at ‘Theory’. That is, 1) an approach that focuses on use, in a language-game sense, thereby penetrating certain ‘grammatical illusions’ (Derrida falls into these grammar traps just when he tries to avoid them, because there is something ultimately formalistic about his notion of ‘play’, which ends up taking the place of use, and keeps you from actually considering use, in a non-formal sense). 2) what if you wrote a philosophy book consisting entirely of jokes? I’ve been thinking about posting a new version of that old dialogue, which I’ve been reworking lately, because I’m still (after all these years) trying to finish the book that it might be part of. Posting it would have two advantages. 1) people who might be interested could read it. 2) people who are disgusted by all such holbonicism wouldn’t have to read it. (But if they are annoyed by the brevity of these posts, which may seem to beg important questions, they could read it. And then say what’s wrong with it! Or just feel superior! Because people could do that even before blogs! So that works, too!)

If you are really so indignant against, or disdainful of, the procedure of tying one’s own shoelaces together, then tripping over them, you should stay out of philosophy. I don’t see that the procedure is avoidable, in the long run. (And what a funny run it can look like, to the spectators.)

I haven’t read that particular piece. I didn’t say that the point of deconstruction is pointless, and I’ll leave the angry turmoil to others (waste of perfectly good nervous energy). If you want to have a debate about Derrida we could do that. It might be interesting. My view is that Derrida goes about what he is doing clumsily, not that what he is trying to do is unworthy of the attempt.

I may as well be a bit more specific about it, although I don’t expect Derrida’s defenders to buy my argument on the basis of a thumbnail sketch. His ‘unconventional logic’, as Slack calls it (and others as well) consists of taking a strong sort of Rationalism and then showing that it ‘deconstructs’. And then this gets labeled as ‘showing how rationalism undermines itself’, and warrantes Derrida’s own posture of ‘being more rational than rational’. On schedule you get an uncanny irruption (like Old Faithful). But the problem came with the first step. Of course strong Rationalism may be too strong. When Searle says: ‘but of course I don’t just assume all that stuff Derrida says I must assume about perfect communication and crystalline concepts and so forth, I’m a Wittgensteinian.’ Derrida sort of Harrumphs. ‘What philosopher never assumed …’ That is, Derrida takes the high Platonic ground against Searle for a moment, which further licenses Derrida’s self-presentation as the True philosopher in this debate. But Searle was in the right. The Derrida game requires the victim to stand in a very particular spot on the stage, marked with a big red X. There isn’t any particular reason to stand on that spot. There are excellent and well-documented reasons not to (Derrida even points out a few himself, in effect.)

So the supposed ‘unconventional logic’ is just a strawman argument, consisting of a conflation of all rational (small r) approaches to philosophy with an implausibly big-R Rational approach to philosophy, which blows up pretty nicely, it must be granted.

That, at any rate, is the outline of how it goes.

Anatole France! I live Anatole France! I was going to write a post about Anatole France. That dialogue that he wrote, which Derrida responds to wearily in “White Mythology”. Quote him, with my blessings!

But fun aside, I’m wondering if Prof. Holbo has read Samuel Wheeler’s “Deconstruction as Analytic Philosophy”, which, while no great shakes, foregrounds the claim that not just Wittgenstein, but Davidson as well, can be understood as undertaking a kind of “conservative” deconstruction of philosophy. Just what does Holbo take the pointless point of “deconstruction” to be, such that it should provoke such angry turmoil and argumentative repudiation? (I’ll take it as given that he grasps Wittgenstein’s point about “criterion” and that the criteria sought in literary studies are much different than those sought in philosophical analysis).

Chris:

The citation from another commenter is from Immanuel Wallerstein, the “world systems” theorist, with hegemonic centers and peripheral territories, etc. But in the 19th century, “liberalism” and “democracy” were regarded as virtual antipodes, and with good reason: just ask the Chartrists. It was only in the latter-day 20th century that such hybrids as “liberal democracy” or “representative democracy” were confected, though “plebiscitary mass democracy” might be a more accurate monniker. I’m taking it that you are not unaware of the long-standing criticism of liberalism as formal equality “under the law” that suppresses and evades the issue of “substantive” equality. (Don’t make me quote Anatole France). But “democracy” is less a name for a political regime or mode of governance than a qualification of one, more of a socio-political ethos within such a frame-of-reference, which usually is assumed to be “republican”. I think all worthwhile arguments or contestations should begin from that.