A quote:

"It's entirely possible that I'm simply missing something, or that I just lack the intellectual capacity to understand the profundities that have been unearthed in the past 20 years or so by Paris intellectuals and their followers. I'm perfectly open-minded about it, and have been for years, when similar charges have been made -- but without any answer to my questions. Again, they are simple and should be easy to answer, if there is an answer: if I'm missing something, then show me what it is, in terms I can understand. Of course, if it's all beyond my comprehension, which is possible, then I'm just a lost cause, and will be compelled to keep to things I do seem to be able to understand, and keep to association with the kinds of people who also seem to be interested in them and seem to understand them (which I'm perfectly happy to do, having no interest, now or ever, in the sectors of the intellectual culture that engage in these things, but apparently little else).

Since no one has succeeded in showing me what I'm missing, we're left with the second option: I'm just incapable of understanding. I'm certainly willing to grant that it may be true, though I'm afraid I'll have to remain suspicious, for what seem good reasons. There are lots of things I don't understand -- say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. --- even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out."

This is a patently unfair test. Without a doubt, someone with infinite patience could take the time to explain all this to Chomsky-- but the fact that he lacks the inclination to actually study Continental Philosophy, and there aren't any volunteers willing to take the time to spoon-feed it to him isn't a reflection on the subject matter.

As an analogy: imagine if Paul McCartney said that someone should explain Perelman's proof of the Poincare Conjecture to him, and that if they couldn't, it meant that it was bunk.

Sure, it's possible that Chomsky hasn't taken the time to truly understand Continental Philosophy or lacks the technical training to understand it even if someone were to explain it all to him.

But it's also possible that continental philosophy is just profound nonsense that thrives based on the following fallacy:

1. Profound stuff (general relativity, quantum mechanics, Poincare conjecture) is very often difficult to understand.

2. Continental philosophy is difficult to understand.

3. Hence, continental philosophy is profound stuff.

Frankly, applying the "looks like a duck, talks like a duck, walks like a duck" criteria, I feel it's more likely that continental philosophy doesn't qualify as a genuine area of human knowledge - it's all just nonsense. But it might serve some other important purpose (e.g., a form of harmless mental hashish that's genuinely pleasurable).

At any rate, pressure for greater clarity and simpler exposition is always good in any field.

Your "looks like a duck, walks like a duck" test would just as easily apply to nuclear physics or non-Euclidean geometry, if you are not already familiar with the terms of art of those fields.

And the pressure for greater clarity and simpler exposition is admirable, so far as it goes-- but (as many mathematics texts demonstrate) notation matters. Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler-- and this latter part is often difficult.

The usefulness of Continental Philosophy could consist in insight into moral, political, and social problems, but providing insight to a few specialists is not much use in those fields, especially not in democratic societies. Looking back on the history of moral and social change in the United States, I don't see such philosophies playing a major role. The thinkers who have made a difference have written for a general audience and in a much more accessible style. (Karl Marx and Das Kapital would seem to be an exception, but he and his evangelists wrote plenty of accessible interpretations of his ideas. The Communist Manifesto, for example, is a brief, readable, and rousing document.) If Continental Philosophers want to justify their existence, they should point to some benefit that their work enables, instead of just complaining that nobody understands it.

I agree with you that greater clarity is good, so long as it doesn't sacrifice truth, or accuracy. But the context here is that Continental Philosophy/Deconstruction/the Humanities do not seem to even consider the pursuit of clarity to be worth its while. It seems, in fact, to value verboseness and unclarity above all else.

I can do it with jargon you already understand, for example,

The totality of the colour blue is the sum of all of the integrals from one meta-point to another meta-point, formed in to spherical husk that can be opened by neither being within or without.

Even though those words are all well-established with their meaning, they are nonsense when strung together.

That's true. And if you can find me a sentence from Derrida that is similarly nonsense, I'll tip my cap to you.

Honestly: it's not "designed to be unintelligible in order to conceal an absence of honest thought."

"And even if one wished to keep sonority on the side of the sensible and contingent signifier which would be strictly speaking impossible, since formal identities isolated within a sensible mass are already idealities that are not purely sensible, it would have to be admitted that the immediate and privileged unity which founds significance and the acts of language is the articulated unity of sound and sense within the phonic."

Taken from here: http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/f...

While reading it, I was honestly asking myself if there were major transcription errors from the original translation, because it's completely impenetrable.

-"In physics, a particle can have different properties at once!"

-"Some people think that the language you speak defines what you can think! There's even languages without numbers, and those people have trouble counting!"

-"There are political philosophies that say everybody should share in everything equally, and others where only the people who work the hardest should get the most stuff!"

-"If you eat more calories than you spend, you'll get fat!"

-"If too many people try to use the same wireless signal at once, it'll get jammed up and won't work right."

And this type of thing seems to hold true for most disciplines. It's possible to get similar layman explanations for just about anything except for, as he's pointing out certain brands of philosophy.

Since we know that a person cannot learn a complex topic at its most complex, they must take simpler stepping stones in a subject till they can achieve comprehension at a high level this implies a couple possibilities:

1) People in this field have worked up through these stepping stones, and by building on various axioms and following certain lines of reasoning, it's possible to achieve a level of comprehension that is based on reducible and explainable models of thinking.

2) There are no stepping stones and it's complex word gibberish without particular meaning. To get "in" to the field, you must master the phrases, secret handshakes and passcodes, to learn the common language of the field, so that you can appear for all purposes as one of the group. It'd be similar to learning a particular dialect of street slang and customs so that you can fit in to a particular neighborhood and not be identified as an immediate outsider. Of course even in that case, words, phrases, actions, customs are all reducible and explainable in simple, general, layman terms ("you wear big clothes and stand and walk like this to thwart the ability of an observer, say the police, in determining if you are carrying a weapon", "you say 'jigga-g' when talking about the leader of the gang", "you spray tags as markings to indicate territory to other gangs").

If 1 is true, then Chomsky should be able to find somebody, anybody, who could do a passable job at explaining this topic in general layman terms such as is possible in every other field. Perhaps he's not really trying very hard, or perhaps the people who inhabit this discipline are particularly intransigent to formulating an articulation of their field for layman without using the domain vocabulary specific to it?

There's a growing consensus external to the field, however, that 2 is true. It would actually be rather simple for the practitioners of this field to counter this sentiment, simply provide a layman's explanation of the topic. But since that seems to be something that nobody can do, and statements like "And the pressure for greater clarity and simpler exposition is admirable, so far as it goes-- but (as many mathematics texts demonstrate) notation matters. Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler-- and this latter part is often difficult." do nothing to assuage this.

The original article of course, highlights one of a number of embarrassing public episodes where a complete outsider strings together a pastiche of phrases into a paper or a presentation or some such, and it passes the muster of the group as being legitimate and meaningful to that group even though it is, by way of purpose, complete gibberish. Again, this further supports the notion that 2 is correct, that the field is composed mostly of nonsense and claims of "no it's not" without supporting evidence or a rough, layman's exposition does nothing to counter that.

It seems much more likely that outsiders looking in on an obscure field resent the work it would take to understand the field, so they bash it. Unlike other complex fields, including any of the sciences (except astrobiology, which clearly is bogus. And maybe evolutionary psychology, which is borderline), lit crit doesn't do much work in the world and most people wouldn't miss it if it were gone. So, that compounds our resentment of having to work to understand it. In other words, it's tough to understand, there's not an obvious payoff for understanding it, so it's easier just to write it off.

This doesn't follow. There are many other ways it could be nonsense, as demonstrated by countless erudite groups from Nebuchadnezzar's astrologers to the Inquisition. None wants to be the one who "doesn't get it".

Moreover, the participants you list--practitioners, students, admirers--are hardly impartial.

Their interests in the emperor's clothes are well vested.

Genius in one field doesn't translate to another.

And, the real strawman is Chomsky's claim that he can't understand Continental Philosophy. I guarantee that if he put in, say, 10-15 hours a week of study for, say, 2 years, he'd have a decent competence without any problem.

Masters of continental philosophy have no problem rendering their fields comprehensible to, say, graduate students in the field. Some (easier) texts are comprehensible to undergrads.

Any "lack of an internal structure, consistency, truth" is imagined by Chomsky.

Really.

With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, “He says so and so,” he always says, “You misunderstood me.” But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that’s not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, “What the hell do you mean by that?” And he said, “He writes so obscurely you can’t tell what he’s saying, that’s the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, ‘You didn’t understand me; you’re an idiot.’ That’s the terrorism part.” And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes.

Ha! Searle is worse than an outsider--he's an outsider by choice.

Searle's misreadings of Derrida are laughable-- and then he has the balls to blame his sloppy reading on JD being obscure.

But don't take my word for it: read the essays in questions.

Derrida's "Signature Event Context" is a brief text, and not terribly difficult to read (if you have read Austin, as Searle has.)

Searle's reply, "Reiterating the Differences", is a disaster. Searle somehow got it in his head that Derrida was attacking Austin (which he was not), and wrote a "defense" of Austin that misreads Derrida atrociously. (Searle has since refused to allow his piece to be anthologized, so you have to hunt it down in the original publication. I have.)

Derrida rebutted with a piece called "Limited Inc a b c", which responds, patiently and at great length, to each of Searle's points. In fact, Derrida manages to quote every single sentence of Searle's piece within his own (which is not an accident, since the dispute is in large part about quotation and citationality in Austin.)

The two Derrida works, along with a precis of Searle's piece, and an interview on the subject, has been published as "Limited Inc", and is a great introduction to Derrida for those coming from the Anglo-American philosophical tradition.

Searle comes out of the debate looking foolish beyond belief, in my opinion.

So other than providing a private game preserve for a peculiar flavor of intellectuals that aren't interested in a day job and can't be bothered to gravitate to fields with demonstrable intrinsic value what, exactly, is the point to all of this?

And so long as these people are teaching 300-level classes to undergrads they're definitely doing something of value, even if it's only creating individuals as jaded as yourself (which who knows, may have some value.)

A `Bad Writer' Bites Back

BERKELEY, Calif. -- In the last few years, a small, culturally conservative academic journal has gained public attention by showcasing difficult sentences written by intellectuals in the academy. The journal, Philosophy and Literature, has offered itself as the arbiter of good prose and accused some of us of bad writing by awarding us "prizes." (I'm still waiting for my check!) The targets, however, have been restricted to scholars on the left whose work focuses on topics like sexuality, race, nationalism and the workings of capitalism -- a point the news media ignored. Still, the whole exercise hints at a serious question about the relation of language and politics: why are some of the most trenchant social criticisms often expressed through difficult and demanding language?

No doubt, scholars in the humanities should be able to clarify how their work informs and illuminates everyday life. Equally, however, such scholars are obliged to question common sense, interrogate its tacit presumptions and provoke new ways of looking at a familiar world.

Many quite nefarious ideologies pass for common sense. For decades of American history, it was "common sense" in some quarters for white people to own slaves and for women not to vote. Common sense, moreover, is not always "common" -- the idea that lesbians and gay men should be protected against discrimination and violence strikes some people as common-sensical, but for others it threatens the foundations of ordinary life.

If common sense sometimes preserves the social status quo, and that status quo sometimes treats unjust social hierarchies as natural, it makes good sense on such occasions to find ways of challenging common sense. Language that takes up this challenge can help point the way to a more socially just world. The contemporary tradition of critical theory in the academy, derived in part from the Frankfurt School of German anti-fascist philosophers and social critics, has shown how language plays an important role in shaping and altering our common or "natural" understanding of social and political realities.

The philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, who maintained that nothing radical could come of common sense, wrote sentences that made his readers pause and reflect on the power of language to shape the world. A sentence of his such as "Man is the ideology of dehumanization" is hardly transparent in its meaning. Adorno maintained that the way the word "man" was used by some of his contemporaries was dehumanizing.

Taken out of context, the sentence may seem vainly paradoxical. But it becomes clear when we recognize that in Adorno's time the word "man" was used by humanists to regard the individual in isolation from his or her social context. For Adorno, to be deprived of one's social context was precisely to suffer dehumanization. Thus, "man" is the ideology of dehumanization.

Herbert Marcuse once described the way philosophers who champion common sense scold those who propagate a more radical perspective: "The intellectual is called on the carpet. . . . Don't you conceal something? You talk a language which is suspect. You don't talk like the rest of us, like the man in the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you."

The accused then responds that "if what he says could be said in terms of ordinary language he would probably have done so in the first place." Understanding what the critical intellectual has to say, Marcuse goes on, "presupposes the collapse and invalidation of precisely that universe of discourse and behavior into which you want to translate it."

Of course, translations are sometimes crucial, especially when scholars teach. A student for whom a word such as "hegemony" appears strange might find that it denotes a dominance so entrenched that we take it for granted, and even appear to consent to it -- a power that's strengthened by its invisibility.

One may have doubts that "hegemony" is needed to describe how power haunts the common-sense world, or one may believe that students have nothing to learn from European social theory in the present academy. But then we are no longer debating the question of good and bad writing, or of whether "hegemony" is an unlovely word. Rather, we have an intellectual disagreement about what kind of world we want to live in, and what intellectual resources we must preserve as we make our way toward the politically new.

I don't understand a lot of high-level physics, but that doesn't lead me to imagine that physicists just sit around bullshitting each other all day.

I don't understand a lot of high-level physics or Continental Philosophy, but the same process that leads me to believe that the physicists aren't sitting around BSing all day leads me to believe that the philosophers are.

(Which is to say, I read enough intro surface level articles that are supposed to give a hint of what you get into once you do begin to understand and talk to people about the same, and form an outsider's opinion. Same process, different results with the two fields.)

I'm guessing you aren't familiar with string theory then. :-P

/duck

PS: Guess which side won?

Sokal punked a minor journal that was not particularly well known in the field. His book with Bricmont, attacking "postmodernism", on the other hand, was published by a major publisher, even though large swaths of it had been thoroughly debunked.

Whereas you aren't likely to find people who're able to so explain deconstruction of something or the like in a manner that's clean and simple and easy to understand. This either suggest that a) the person doesn't understand it, fully, himself; or b) deconstruction/humanities is so difficult no human mind can fully understand it.

If the interested party is already well read in the philosophical works of Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud and Levinas, I could probably do it in a weekend.

(Or as Chomsky argues - why is deconstruction necessary when the conclusions it reaches can be simply divined by ordinary laypersons, without all the verbosity and the pretentiousness of language?)

Let's start with you reading (and demonstrating to me a core competence of) the basic texts of philosophy leading up to deconstruction-- in this case, that would be Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud and Levinas.

When you have those six down, I'd be happy to explain deconstruction to you.

What you should be saying is "Deconstruction is an approach, introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, which rigorously pursues the meaning of a text to the point of exposing the contradictions and internal oppositions upon which it is apparently founded and showing that those foundations are irreducibly complex, unstable or impossible" (courtesy wikipedia).

And then the layman asks "how does this approach expose contradictions?"

And you say "Deconstructions work entirely within the studied text to expose and undermine the frame of reference, assumptions, and ideological underpinnings of the text. Although deconstructions can be developed using different methods and techniques, the process typically involves demonstrating the multiple possible readings of a text and their resulting internal conflicts, and undermining binary oppositions (e.g. masculine/feminine, old/new)."

and there we have it, good enough for the layman to realize it's a line of thinking he's probably not interested in pursuing anymore. And then...if they keep on that, you say, "this is getting a bit into the deep end for me to make it simple and explainable, if you are really interested, start by reading these books first."

Chomsky claims to have found "Of Grammatology" full of "pathetic misreadings." Unfortunately, he doesn't take the time to outline what these might be-- and oddly enough, neither does anybody else, to my knowledge. I know of only one publication claiming that Derrida misreads his sources in "OG", and that was in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement many years ago; several responses were published, and personally, I don't think Derrida misread Curtius as claimed.

Now, although the subject matter of "Of Grammatology" is nominally linguistics, we have to remember that Derrida is not a linguist (nor pretending to be) and is interested, rather, in the philosophical implications of several arguments concerning linguistics made by Saussure, Levi-Strauss and Rousseau. And, to the best of my knowledge, Chomsky shows no interest in his published writings in the latter two, and isn't much enamored with the former.

So, "Of Grammatology" is only tangentially related to Chomsky's field of interest. Which is fine, of course. But I suspect that this lead him to be more dismissive than necessary: I think he mistakes his lack of interest with Derrida's lack of a point.

Derrida does make an important argument in OG, but it is largely aimed at a certain group of Structuralists, who were active in the French academy at the time it was published. In other words, Derrida's in the middle of a fight that Chomsky has nothing at all to do with, and I think his lack of skin in the game got in the way of an open-minded reading.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1489199

Thought it was worth its own post - I actually gained a little more respect for deconstruction after reading the article. Before I thought it was entirely nonsense, now I see that it might have some validity if used in an intelligent and honest way. Credit to dmlorenzetti for commenting with the link, very insightful.

In the end, it probably amounts to most people (very arguably for the better) being unwilling to declare something as bunk just because they don't personally understand it or see the merit.

I think the real test should be outside application. If the supposed advances made in some particular arm of literature can only have meaning, effect and influence within that closed literary community, then what can it really be doing for society as a whole? Ultimately we want a discipline to offer something to the world at large, not just to itself. You don't have to be a scientist to see the merit in studying the human heart, you just have to know (or just be able to conceive) someone with heart disease. And it's not just sciences that could withstand this test. If studying music theory helps people to write more beautiful songs, that will be apparent to many people who have no music training whatsoever.

Point being, I think the real acid test is outside application. I won't leap to the conclusion that deconstructionism is garbage. I just ask to be shown that understanding it does indeed help someone to do something other than write deconstruction papers.

I think that Postmodernism may be a bit of a waste of time, but it's too early for me to know. Unfortunately they wish the public fund their work.

-- John Locke

Now, it's one thing to question the artistic merits of literature studied in academia, such as the almost impenetrable "Finnegan's Wake". It's not all because of its vernacular (I can't really read too much of it at a time because it blurs into almost gibberish after awhile and I lose track of stuff I'd just read a line prior), but because it seriously doesn't make any damned sense sometimes, which is common when alot of it is written stream of conscious.

But, I get the argument: literary criticism is self-perpetuating, self-congratulatory stuff in many cases. But, just as for every solid software developer who understands the art and science of software construction in the tradition of Fred Brooks or Steven McConnell, there is the spaghetti coder with terrible habits (pushing broken code to the repo, no code commenting, etc.). The same laziness and idiosyncratic behavior is rife in litcrit as well. For every Harold Bloom and James Wood, there's alot of hacks that toss off their "deconstructions" rife with tautologies and dense nonsense. It's part of any discipline to separate the good from the bad; the humanities is no different.

A discipline either establishes common criteria to distinguish good stuff from bad stuff or it doesn't. And these should not be arbitrary otherwise the judgment remains subjective and therefore worthless.

Since you admit that "there's alot of hacks", it seems literary criticism has no criteria or they are mostly subjective. Otherwise, you wouldn't have such a lot of hacks, but just a few.

It obviously produces hardly anything worth knowing, no?

\ I worked with a guy who would copy and paste program, with many many repetitions of blocks. After of getting a barely working result, would seemingly decide "oh functions are important in programming" and randomly break the code into a few functions, which each took 10+ arguments to carry state over from chunk to chunk. Since these were essentially just chaining the calls, none of the functions would be called elsewhere, no repetition was avoided, and extra cognitive load was added to reading the results. When this was done, the original author could not understand how it was different, let alone better.

1) Establish the "text" in question as well as the "context" of the text (certain themes, symbolism, diction, universality, etc.)

2) apply culturual congruity (whether you are applying the criticism to the time when the text was written or to modern times),

3) Establish your point of argument and/or analysis.

4) Apply argument to the text

5) Connect the evidence of this argument.

6) Conclusion

The fact that I use Bloom as a shining example of "good" criticism should steer you in the direction that there is quality there. His just one example of good work.

Is there an API to access Plato's Republic's quality hooks? No, but there are best practices. Just because you refuse to see them as common criteria doesn't diminish the task at hand. If you refuse to accept it as legitimate, you might as well refuse to accept there are such things as great literature and creation beyond the programmatic kind.

And when most people talk about great literature, they aren't talking about either thing. Most people mean something like Adler's Great Books criteria when they talk about great literature:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_books

Michael Dorfman is right. Deconstruction is not a single method or mechanical process.

Deconstruction is perhaps best understood if you think of Derrida as an elaborate troll. It is a general strategy for trolling philosophers. All the biographies of Derrida I've read have used words like "playful" to describe him, like he's fucking Loki or something. He says "That work of Plato you're so fond of quoting doesn't really mean what you think it means!" and comes up with a convincing argument for why this is so. (The best trolls sound believable, even to those with well-trained and sensitive BS detectors.) It also explains why deconstruction can only be understood within the context of the philosophical tradition: trolling only works if it's tailored to the traditions and preconceptions of its audience.

The beautiful part is that philosophers who've been trolled are surreptitiously recruited into practicing the same trolling technique themselves.

I sympathize with the author's desire to make fun of that which he doesn't understand, but ultimately, it's a shallow game.

C'mon, this is Hacker News, we don't say "This is wrong, but I won't tell you why" here. For what it's worth, I'd actually like to hear your perspective if you take the time.

The article provided a coherent explanation of deconstruction that jives with what my eyes see, which makes it the best thing I've seen on the topic. But if you see holes in it, why not take the time to point them out? I'd like to understand more since this style of academia seems to be influential in universities these days.

Deconstruction is, roughly speaking (and believe, me, I'm speaking schematically here) for the purposes of this discussion, the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, and his followers. (We'll ignore, for the moment, the more literary analysis of Paul De Man, which often go under the name of deconstruction as well.)

Derrida makes it very clear throughout his writings that deconstruction is not a repeatable method which can be applied to a text, but rather, an engagement with a text on its own terms. So, there is no "formula" or set of steps that can be applied.

Second, despite the author's reduction of deconstruction to a branch of literary criticism, the texts in question are more often from the philosophical corpus than from the literary tradition. While it's true that Derrida devotes more attention to folks like Joyce, Celan and Genet than most philosophers do, the quantity of pages he devotes to them is a tiny fragment of the time he devotes to Heidegger, Husserl and Hegel, for instance.

Despite the author's step-by-step breakdown, deconstruction in practice doesn't work this way. If I were forced to generalize (and I suppose I am), I would say that deconstruction consists most often of a micrological reading (that is to say, a very close reading of the actual words of the text, not not just the broad concepts) which takes into account the (usually unconscious) assumptions that the author is working within. Most often, these assumptions, when taken to their logical conclusion lead to either a contradiction or an aporia, and the text often reflects this, unknowingly. So, a deconstructive reading often picks up on latent implications of the text itself.

I should point out that the author here is completely wrong when he writes "Step 2 -- Decide what the text says. This can be whatever you want...." This is egregiously incorrect. In fact, one of Derrida's main points is that we do not decide at all what the text says. (As an aside, decidability is actually a term of art within deconstruction, so the author's abuse of it here is particularly irksome. If he had say "figure out" instead of "decide" he'd have been less wrong on several counts.)

To take a concrete (and much celebrated) example, Derrida's "Plato's Pharmacy" is a reading of Plato's Phaedrus. It will make absolutely no sense to you if you haven't already read the Phaedrus closely, and are already familiar with the traditional interpretation of the text within philosophical circles. Sorry, but that's the bar to entry.

Assuming that you know the Phaedrus, then: the central moment in the text (according to the standard reading) is the condemnation of writing-- you know the passage. In the course of this, Plato (or rather Socrates, or rather, an Egyptian king in a legend recounted by Socrates recounted by Plato) compares writing to a drug, using the Greek word "pharmakon". Derrida shows that this word, like the English word "drug", has both a positive sense ("remedy") and a negative sense ("poison"), and cannot be reduced to either singular meaning. Furthermore, the oscillation between these two meanings cannot be fully controlled, but only understood through context, which is never saturated (never fully complete.) Put simply, if you call something a drug, you can't exclude either the positive or negative meaning in the mind of the listener. Now, at this point, Derrida then goes through the entire Platonic corpus, and quotes every time the word "pharmakon" or one of its cognates ("pharmikia", etc.) is mentioned, and shows the range of meanings implied by this term for Plato, and its implications for the passage in the Phaedrus. So far, so good. But here comes the kicker: Derrida shows that although Plato uses a variety of related terms throughout his works, there is one cognate which is notable by its absence: "pharmakos", meaning "scapegoat". And this ghost-reference to scapegoating seems to fit quite well with what Plato is doing with writing.

Now, I've trivialized Derrida's argument in at least a dozen ways in writing this-- and as I said, the above will not make any sense if you're not already steeped in the debates within the philosophical tradition about "writing" versus "speech", which are of little interest to anybody outside of the philosophical tradition. But that's a taste of what deconstruction is like, and how it operates.

I'll note in passing that there is only one "binary opposition" that Derrida is at all interested in within his work-- "interior" vs "exterior"-- and the "speech" vs "writing" discussion in Plato is a proxy for this.

The paper linked here make "jive with what your eyes see", because it was written by somebody on the outside, looking in. And I'm sure that if I were to write an outsider's view of a discipline I knew nothing about (say, astro-physics) it might look completely plausible to another outsider, while in reality bearing little resemblance to what actually goes on within the discipline.

Does that help at all?

To me at least, it sounds like perhaps what you are talking about is legitimate, sincere deconstruction, whereas the author is talking (correctly, in my opinion) about an "evil twin" so to speak (ie: conservatives --> neo-conservatives).

>If he had say "figure out" instead of "decide"...

I think that statement illustrates the disconnect...."figuring out" is what should be done, but "deciding" is what is often actually done. To me it seems you are talking about the uncompromised (correctly implemented) theory, whereas he is talking about what the theory has typically become, in actual practice. If that makes any sense.

Perhaps I am; where does this evil twin reside?

I am speaking of the work of Derrida, and the work of his followers that is (for the sake of simplicity) published by university presses-- because that's what I read.

If the "evil twins" are undergrad posers, well, I don't really know or care what they're up to these days.

I think that statement illustrates the disconnect...."figuring out" is what should be done, but "deciding" is what is often actually done. To me it seems you are talking about the uncompromised (correctly implemented) theory, whereas he is talking about what the theory has typically become, in actual practice. If that makes any sense.

It makes sense, but it's not what I was getting at.

My point was a Nietzschean one (which Derrida concurs with).

We don't consciously choose how to interpret a text.

Here's a link to an old Usenet post I wrote, which collects a few Derrida quotations, one of which is precisely on this subject:

http://groups.google.com/group/humanities.classics/browse_th...

(Sorry about the crappy formating there...)

About 70% of the humanities papers I've ever attempted to read had a much lower insight:word ratio than the newspaper. The humanities aren't fundamentally technical in the way physics is - they're always making subjective judgments, and everything's up for interpretation. So just say it, then, don't give me a bunch of stupid .25 cent word padding. I have a good vocabulary, I know those words, and I'm not impressed. If your idea can't be distilled to a simpler formulation than most of the crazy crap I saw in my friends' reading when I was an undergrad, you're probably not saying much of import.

PS your excellent summary above was a case of good writing. You could have made the same point using 4X as much words and a bunch of crazy but still-technically-grammatical-therefore-smart sentence structures, and that would have been the evil twin. Usually, when someone resorts to the silly-season writing, it's a good indicator that they don't actually have a point.

1. This is true

2. This works

3. This sounds true

4. This sounds neat

With all due respect, the example of Derrida's deconstruction that you give ("pharmakos" and all that) doesn't seem to rise above level 4.

I'm sorry that my one-paragraph summary of Derrida's reading of the Phaedrus was not up to your high standards. Perhaps you would like to offer a one-paragraph summary of some other reading of the Phaedrus that you think rises above level 4?

I think this is the main portion of the debate: all this talk is nonsense in any bigger picture.

I would like to point out then, that to this layman, "I would say that deconstruction consists most often of a micrological reading (that is to say, a very close reading of the actual words of the text, not not just the broad concepts) which takes into account the (usually unconscious) assumptions that the author is working within" sounds almost exactly like, "Decide what the text says. This can be whatever you want..." since we can't ever know what the unconscious assumptions are of an author.

It does, yes. Thanks for taking the time, that was really detailed and informative.

Continental Philosophy is a fascinating discipline, and I really don't understand why people who don't understand it feel the need to dismiss it via a caricature.

I didn't really expect the author's jokey explanation of deconstruction to be technically accurate, and I can understand why it would irritate people in the field.

I'd be more interested to hear what you think of his other arguments, and the comments quoted by Chomsky in this thread.

In particular charges of obscurantism, intellectually-vain tail-chasing, being 'epistemologically challenged', his metaphors of 'genetic drift' and 'peacock feathers' where academic communities evolve to fill the vacuum with linguistic puffery, jargon and self-referential bullshit in the absence of any clearly-stated objective or externally-imposed goals and success criteria.

Admittedly critical theory is far from the only academic discipline to be subject to these accusations. And maybe you'd argue that in this case the accusations aren't valid.

But, you'd have to admit that, by virtue of their epistemic outlook and the criterea they have available by which to assess research, some disciplines are inevitably going to be more susceptible to these phenomena than others, and hence need to work harder to combat them.

This may be how it looks to an outsider like Chomsky, but it's not an accurate description of the academic communities that he is not a party to.

"Jargon" is what an outsider calls another discipline's terms of art. "Generative grammar" is jargon to a ballet dancer. "Battement tendu" is jargon to a linguist.

I'm sorry if Chomsky expects philosophy to have a "clearly-stated objective" or "externally imposed goals and success criteria" beyond what they've had for the past couple millenia, but there you have it.

I'd say that it's possible, and worthwhile, to investigate and make some attempt at classifying jargons with respect to properties like:

* To what extent do layers of jargon correspond to layers of depth of ideas in the field which they describe * How precisely-defined are they, and how well-founded are the definitions * Are there clear externally-verifiable criteria which can be used to distinguish valid use from misuse or dishonest, empty, bullshitty use of the jargon.

Congrats on the family, business, and studies - that is a pretty full plate. I do appreciate you taking the time - a very important step in learning about something is knowing enough to ask the first couple intelligent questions to someone of the discipline. Cheers for that.

Thanks.

(Mind you, I'm still not convinced this is worthwhile, since it appears that the point could be made more clearly without the linguistic exercise, but I haven't made any attempt to read the original so I know that's not entirely fair.)

It's that until you've at least acquired core competence in Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud and Levinas, being exposed to the OT VIII levels of post-structuralist theory is likely to cause your brain to explode.

If it doesn't have a method or a formula, could you instead tell us what deconstruction is? How can I tell it from a best-seller or the output of a Markov text generator?

Could you simply point out the most outrageous error in the text? Or just an outrageous error?

> I sympathize with the author's desire to make fun of that which he doesn't understand, but ultimately, it's a shallow game.

I reject your attempt to belittle the author by suggesting they are shallow. Your response is fallacious (telling us there are errors without pointing out what they are, ad hominem against the author) and, in claiming to "sympathise" with the author's supposed "desire to make fun", snobbish.

I try to be as civil on the internet as I am in real life. IRL, I'd say "Stop sneering and tell us something useful, or go away."

Here are a few outrageous errors, taken at random: "Deconstruction, in particular, is a fairly formulaic process" "points are awarded on the basis of style and wit rather than substance," "Decide what the text says. This can be whatever you want,"

I try to be as civil on the internet as I am in real life. IRL, I'd say "Stop sneering and tell us something useful, or go away."

The useful something I would tell you is: don't assume that people making fun of something actually understand what that something is. Furthermore, don't assume that just because something can't be easily explained in a blog post, it is nonsense. And finally, don't be surprised when people who take a complex discipline seriously are reluctant to engage with dismissive outsiders with an axe to grind and no real desire to engage. (My brother-in-law is a professor of Shakespeare at Cambridge, and you should see the look on his face when someone at a cocktail party raises the "authorship" issue...)

Would you also consider Noam Chomsky (I refer to the link posted within this thread) to be a "dismissive outsiders with an axe to grind and no real desire to engage"? Could it be possible that they are reluctant to engage within anyone who questions their assertions?

Many times I've encountered people who seem to use techniques described in the article when trying to discuss social issues, and in my experience at least, when you ask them to explain what they have just said in a prior statement, the usual response is a change of subject, even though I am genuinely interested in understanding their point of view. They are more than happy to continue the conversation as long as it consists of them continually making assertions in obtuse language, and casually deflecting questions by changing the subject, but the moment you insist they explain something they just said, the conversation usually ends. In my experiences, anyways.

As interesting as I find the subject, I think Chomsky's got the right idea: "End of Reply, and (to be frank) of my personal interest in the matter, unless the obvious questions are answered."

when you ask them to explain what they have just said in a prior statement, the usual response is a change of subject, even though I am genuinely interested in understanding their point of view

This is quite understandable, I'm afraid. Trying to explain Heidegger to someone who hasn't read Kant is a very difficult game indeed. If you're genuinely interested in learning the more elevated parts of a discipline, you need to put in some time on the basics.

> "points are awarded on the basis of style and wit rather than substance,"

This is a cheap shot, and is mostly about style and wit, rather than substance. But is it possible that writing in a more obtuse manner is rewarded within academic circles, which I believe is the argument actually being made?

> "Decide what the text says. This can be whatever you want,"

Again, this is cheap, and I guess is also a shot at post-modernism in general. From the author's and your comments, I guess it should have been "Choose an accepted, face-value interpretation of the text."

> "Deconstruction, in particular, is a fairly formulaic process"

But here I don't see your argument. From your other posting, Derrida then goes through the entire Platonic corpus, and quotes every time the word "pharmakon" certainly sounds formulaic. You also say I would say that deconstruction consists most often of a micrological reading (that is to say, a very close reading of the actual words of the text, not not just the broad concepts) which takes into account the (usually unconscious) assumptions that the author is working within. Most often, these assumptions, when taken to their logical conclusion lead to either a contradiction or an aporia, and the text often reflects this, unknowingly. So, a deconstructive reading often picks up on latent implications of the text itself. That sounds formulaic, so it what sense is it a bad description of deconstruction?

If deconstruction is not a formula for lit crit, what is it? Deconstruction can't be the philosophy of Derrida. Well, it can be, but the obvious question is then, what is the philosophy of Derrida? I think this is the core issue. If the philosophy cannot be explained to an outsider, then to what extent is it a real thing, and to what extent is the collective hallucination of the in-group?

> don't assume that people making fun of something actually understand what that something is.

I should like to apologise and take back my comment that you were sneering. It was rude, and as it turns out, untrue. You genuinely believe the author is trying to make fun of the philosophy, but I don't think he is. He has read the books and thinks he can explain what deconstruction is. He takes a somewhat dim view of it to be sure, but that doesn't mean he doesn't understand it or that he wants to make fun of it.

> don't assume that just because something can't be easily explained in a blog post, it is nonsense.

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1490304 for Chomsky's comments on this. (Basically, no-one has explained it to me yet, and I don't get it, and I'm damm smart, so it's either way over my head, and therefore very smart indeed, or bunk.)

> don't be surprised when people who take a complex discipline seriously are reluctant to engage with dismissive outsiders with an axe to grind and no real desire to engage. (My brother-in-law is a professor of Shakespeare at Cambridge, and you should see the look on his face when someone at a cocktail party raises the "authorship" issue...)

I am in no way dismissive of philosophy and my axe is sharp enough. As I see it, in this case the insiders are dismissive of the outsiders -- "you have to read all these works to even understand what we are talking about, and we might still say you are not in the in-group and you are just trying to make fun of us." Given that, it is hardly surprising when outsiders are dismissive of you.

Well, we certainly disagree there. I don't think the piece was written as a good-faith attempt to explain deconstruction, but rather, as an attempt to ridicule and dismiss it, for the most part.

But is it possible that writing in a more obtuse manner is rewarded within academic circles, which I believe is the argument actually being made?

It's possible, but not accurate. Philosophers are not obscure just for the hell of it, any more than physicists are. And any outliers who are perceived as being needlessly obscure are not rewarded for this-- quite the contrary.

From the author's and your comments, I guess it should have been "Choose an accepted, face-value interpretation of the text."

Actually, we don't "choose" the interpretation at all when we read a text.

But here I don't see your argument. From your other posting, Derrida then goes through the entire Platonic corpus, and quotes every time the word "pharmakon" certainly sounds formulaic. Is it's not a formula for lit crit, what is it?

This is indeed the crux of the biscuit. The fact that (in his reading of the Phaedrus) Derrida quoted every time the word "pharmakon" came up does not make this a general formula to be applied to every other text. In fact, I can't think of another example where Derrida did something similar to another text (i.e., pulling out all of the instances of a particular word in an author's corpus.)

In other words: the way that Derrida read the Phaedrus is not a model for how one should read another text.

What is noteworthy is that Derrida found the tools for reading the Phaedrus within the Phaedrus itself; he did not apply some outside formula to the text.

If the philosophy cannot be explained to an outsider, then to what extent is it a real thing, and to what extent is the collective hallucination of the in-group?

It can be explained to an outsider, if that outsider has the necessary background and patience. You wouldn't expect to be able to explain a proposed proof of the Riemann Hypothesis to someone who didn't know algebra, would you?

In order to properly understand Derrida's philosophy, you need a solid understanding of the philosophies of Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel, Freud, Nietzsche and Levinas. (Derrida admits as much in one of his notable early works.) I promise you that to anyone who has that background, Derrida will be perfectly understandable.

(Basically, no-one has explained it to me yet, and I don't get it, and I'm damm smart, so it's either way over my head, and therefore very smart indeed, or bunk.)

That is an adequate representation of Chomsky's view. Unfortunately, it's a category error. Chomsky is indeed, very smart. That doesn't mean that he should expect his genius to transfer to disciplines outside his own. If Chomsky had the patience (and inclination) to adequately study Continental Philosophy, I guarantee he'd be able to understand it in a year or two of study. The fact that he's not interested in doing so, and that no-one else is willing to try to spoon-feed it to him is no reflection on the discipline itself.

As I see it, in this case the insiders are dismissive of the outsiders -- "you have to read all these works to even understand what we are talking about, and we might still say you are not in the in-group and you are just trying to make fun of us." Given that, it is hardly surprising when outsiders are dismissive of you.

I wasn't referring to you, I was referring to the author of the piece, who certainly is dismissive of deconstruction, and seems to have an axe to grind. Furthermore, the pseudo-quote you offer is a canard: this is what all disciplines do. And, in fact, Derrida has a nice interview on the subject on "The Ethics of Discussion", which states that the sine qua non for any ethics of discussion is to actually read the work one is criticizing. You wouldn't trust a film critic who didn't see the film, right? So, why is it so much to ask that someone actually read a philosopher (and the prerequisites he relies upon) before dismissing him?

If I already perceived half of those guys as going in the wrong direction entirely, is there any value to reading what is essentially a commentary on them?

I must say, a long exposure to the analytic tradition has, to me, evaporated all these excuses. When you're saying something about morality or the nature of knowledge, you can state it directly, even at the risk of restating some elements that others have stated. This is true even if you're directly responding to them (in which case you restate the points you are responding to). The main prerequisite is a training in logic, simply because many statements in analytic philosophy are most clearly expressed in variously-formal logical forms.

On the other hand, if you're only offering a commentary on past philosophers, perhaps some novel technique of reading their texts (which, judging by your posts, seems to be Derrida's primary innovation) is enough of an innovation.

> So, why is it so much to ask that someone actually read a philosopher (and the prerequisites he relies upon) before dismissing him?

It is indeed not too much to ask. However, if a pure scientist says to me, "I can't explain it, but we're discovering something we think is interesting," I have more faith in her than a philosopher saying much the same thing, and I'm more happy for e.g. the government to fund her research and not the philosopher's. Is that wrong?

I find Derrida to be a fascinating philosopher for several reasons. One, his thought has a profoundly ethical component (influenced by Levinas). Second, he questions many of the assumptions that other philosophers have taken for granted (in a way similar to Nietzsche). Third, he has a very subtle phenomenology which I personally find very compelling (i.e., it seems to aid my understanding of the world.)

Of course, your mileage may vary.

However, if a pure scientist says to me, "I can't explain it, but we're discovering something we think is interesting," I have more faith in her than a philosopher saying much the same thing, and I'm more happy for e.g. the government to fund her research and not the philosopher's. Is that wrong?

Obligatory joke-- College president, to the head of the physics department: "Why do you need such a big budget for equipment? Why can't you be like the mathematics department? all they ask for are pencils and wastebaskets. Or, better yet, like the philosophy department-- all they ask for are pencils..."

I think Derrida would've been much better off, in terms of intellectual legacy, if he had a student who took him somewhat less seriously on that point, perhaps even against his wishes. Say, someone who was willing to write even a fairly difficult and technical book, but in straightforward, fairly clear prose, attempting to explain at least a version of the main ideas Derrida's works dealt with. Instead, he got people who sort of pushed him in the opposite direction, Derrideans whose prose was somehow even "more Derridean" than his own, and who didn't really do much as far as explaining his ideas to anyone who didn't already buy them. Put differently, what difficult but possibly brilliant thinkers need are clear and convincing expositors, not also-difficult-yet-mediocre imitators.

You want to know the funny thing? He did exactly that.

One of Derrida's most prominent students, Geoff Bennington, wrote a book (with Derrida's approval and authorization) which attempted to summarize Derrida's work for the general reader. To make the game more interesting, he attempted to do so without directly quoting Derrida a single time. And, just to put a nice bow on it all, Derrida read the manuscript, and wrote a piece (which is published in the same volume) outlining briefly the parts of his philosophy he thought were excluded by Bennington's summary.

If you can't explain something, you don't understand it. If no-one can explain it, no-one understands it and it doesn't mean anything. A theory with no predictive power is useless.

(As an aside, I had a look at some of Geoff Bennington's other freely accessible work and came across the gem "The end of communication is the end of communication." That's a clever pun, but was it really the best way to explain an obtuse philosophy that others regard as simply an edifice of clever puns and tricks, void of thought? Ballsy, but surely not the best way. Has anyone explained Derrida using words of four letters or less, without a single pun?)

I am wasting too much of my time, and yours, so my parting shot shall be this: Is there any point attempting to understand this philosophy? Will it make me a better person? Will it enable me to organise society better? Will it help me understand the universe more fully? Or will it simply mean I can count myself part of an in-group that has no discernible external beliefs?

And, then, of course, he goes on to do the impossible. This notion of "the impossible" is, in itself, a key concept in Derrida's thought, but we're getting ahead of ourselves.

If you can't explain something, you don't understand it. If no-one can explain it, no-one understands it and it doesn't mean anything. A theory with no predictive power is useless.

I can explain it. Geoff Bennington can explain it. However: you have to meet us partway. You have to read the whole damn book, not just the Amazon previews.

Seriously: is that too much to ask?

Has anyone explained Derrida using words of four letters or less, without a single pun?)

Has anybody explained Kant, or Einstein, or Descartes or Newton or any other difficult thinker in words of four letters or less?

Is there any point attempting to understand this philosophy?

Yes.

Will it make me a better person?

Yes, in my experience. (It is largely about ethics, believe it or not.)

Will it enable me to organise society better?

To a certain extent, yes. And it will better help you understand why certain efforts to organise society are doomed to fail.

Will it help me understand the universe more fully?

Yes, definitely.

Or will it simply mean I can count myself part of an in-group that has no discernible external beliefs?

It has discernible external beliefs, I'm afraid. I hope that's not a deal-breaker for you.

Four letters? No. Not even this sentence has only words of four letters or less.

However many major contributions of Newton, Descartes, and Einstein to mathematics and science have been broken down and simplified until they both can be and are routinely taught to high school students. Seriously, when I graduated from grade 12 I understood the basic coordinate system (Descartes), simple Calculus (Newton), conservation of momentum (Newton again), the Newtonian theory of gravity (Newton again) and the Special Theory of Relativity (Einstein).

Furthermore if you pick up The Feynman Lectures on Physics you will find understandable expositions of all of these, and plenty more. All are covered, along with a great many other things, in the first half of the first book alone. Often a major concept, such as basic Calculus, is explained in just a few pages.

Given that that's what scientists tend to do with their theories, are you surprised that they would look for something similar with other people's theories?

http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/al.html -- Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity (In Words of Four Letters or Less)

On the basis of your answers I shall read the Bennington suggested, but I must admit I'm not optimistic. Discernible external beliefs are not a deal-breaker; they are the point of the deal.

I would like to conclude there (feel free to have the last word; that is not an attempt to cut off the discussion on my terms, but merely to get on with some work :-) You have been somewhat persuasive and very civil in the face of my disagreement, thank you. Thank you also for your time, I owe you a beer/coffee (and by then maybe I can have done the reading and we can talk properly.)

If not, the Bennington isn't going to be of much use.

Derrida situates himself within a particular tradition; it's (necessarily) hard to read him in isolation.

Trying to read Derrida on, say, Condillac, is absolutely pointless if you haven't read the Condillac.

Fortunately, in the course of his career, Derrida read through a large swath of the philosophical corpus, so it should be pretty easy to find a work of his which comments on something you already know well.

Still, I chuckled when I read it.

[1]barry's intro to critical theory http://books.google.com/books?id=SNy26bx7L5UC&printsec=f...

So foreign language is another barrier to entry that hasn't been mentioned yet. There are English translations, but often they aren't very good. My process for engaging with a philosopher is an iterative, multi-pass process - I start with several introductory texts or a biography before (very slowly) tackling a main text. At that point, I usually have a good idea about where the argument is going, but only a thin grasp of how we got there, so I go through the material once or twice more. This is complicated by the fact that these ideas don't stand on their own, they are part of a tradition, and it's not really possible to take one thinker and find out what he or she thinks, because it's filled with references to others. It's just not possible to pick up a main text and read it in a weekend and expect to get anything out of it - it's more like a lifetime project, something you'd add to a "Things to accomplish before I die" list. If "Learn French or German" is on there too, you have a head start.

One practical benefit is that reading a difficult text is like running with weights on. It feels like you're flying when you read something easier. And if you're looking for critiques or refutations of postmodernism specifically, continental philosophy is much more interesting than this link. Ironically, it's somewhat self-refuting, since in trying to critique the postmodernists, it unknowingly adopts an important (although distorted) postmodern point: the role of discourse in the production of power and authority. Although, of course, the author uses this to assert the superiority of his preferred rationalist, technocratic regime of truth. In other words, the claim is that postmodernism is an imposter, a bullshit pretender to the throne that Engineering should rightfully occupy. Postmodernists, under the influence of Derrida and Foucault, would say that this claim is "logocentric", a code word which ultimately means patriarchal, racist, colonialist, homophobic, etc. The demand that "postmodernism" present itself as a single well-defined and unified idea would also be seen in this light, which is probably why no postmodernists are here to defend themselves. To them, it's boringly obvious that software engineering is philosophically rooted in patriarchy.