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Decon 101 Until about thirty years ago, literary criticism was literary itself. You could plop down into a hard wooden chair in any Ivy League classroom and listen to a literate, rationally constructed lecture. Unfortunately, you might squirm in your seat a little more today. I remember one lecture from my classics course last term. My professor’s analysis of Prometheus Bound was one hour long. Over half of it was spent on a discussion of “the uterus” and Greek drama as a “warning tale to young Greek girls,” ostensibly to perpetuate the sexist and oppressionist paradigms propagated by a pre-conceived construct of an innately misogynistic society. Greek women, held together only by self-actuated threads of diverse, yet autonomous conceptions of empowered selfhood and womanness, somehow managed to survive the Hellenic age. Confused? Welcome to the New Academy. The driving force behind almost all of these changes is the rise of deconstructionism. The movement began primarily in French intellectual circles. In essence, it toyed with the very concept of individual words and concepts in a text and discarded their overall context. By this method, all texts, all symbols, all representations are equally relevant — a stop sign is just as important as The Last Supper, a Bazooka Joe comic strip as The Sound and the Fury, or Mmm...Bop as a Mozart concerto. Now held with liturgical reverence, the tenents of deconstructionism are firmly entrenched in the new academy. It’s not hard to see why. Just as the analysis of minutiae is more important than the overall meaning of the text, the critic is more important than the author, and, ultimately, the work itself. By this line of reasoning, a professor’s spin on a novel is suddenly more important than the author’s, even if the author happens to be Faulkner, Shakespeare, or Dante. Even the mainstream media has taken notice of this trend. Writing on the recent flurry of agonizingly narcissistic academic memoirs in the October ‘97 issue of Vanity Fair, James Wolcott observed that “the academic community accepts this phenomenon with open arms (and legs) because it is in the thick of its own pierced-navel-gazing orgy, ... It’s as if post-modern eggheads were proclaiming, ‘It was really me crying all along beneath the steady drizzle of Wordsworth’s Immortality Ode. Me! Me and my separation issues! My Socially constructed body image! My burgeoning bisexuality!’” From the very beginning, deconstructionism has been riddled with virtually incomprehensible jargon. A typical passage comes from the godfather of deconstructionist theory, Jacques Derrida, “Whence the regular erasure of the archi-, and the transformation of general seminology into grammatology, this latter executing a critical labor on everything within seminology, including the central concept of the sign, that maintained metaphysical presuppositions incompatible with the motif of differance.” Much like the theory itself, the new scholarship is also driven by formulaic jargon. Though it may look a bit daunting, its structure is fairly regular. Take a fairly vague verb and nominalize it. Take a vague noun and add an -ism or -ist suffix. Combine them with a linking verb, race/class/gender category and a few nominalizations. From this, you can deduce that the self-actualization of Asian lower-middle class women was really a calculated subjugation by a sexist, imperialist inculcation. Though this may sound a bit oversimplified, consider the case of Professor Alan Sokal, a physicist at New York University. An avowed leftist who actually shuns convoluted jargon because it hinders leftist political action, Sokal submitted an article to the leading deconstruction journal SocialText, run out of Duke University. His basic argument was intentionally absurd — that physical laws and constant are subjective to different races, classes, and genders. By this argument, gravity and the speed of light are different for blacks, whites, and women. However, Sokal couched the piece deep in deconstructionist jargon. SocialText ran the piece without question, and, only after its publication, did Sokal reveal that his argument was a nonsensical ruse. Amazingly, even after Sokal announced his prank, SocialText editor Stanley Fish and other leading deconstructionist mavens continued to defend the merit of the piece. As Sokal’s experiment proved, the dense prose of the new academy is a convenient way to cloak any academic misgivings — it is so unapproachable that few have the time or ability to decipher it, let alone criticize it. In effect, jargon has become a refuge for pedantic and empty ideas. Underneath Sokal’s clever ploy, however, there is another disturbing portrait of the new academy — that the academic and the political are not only inseparable, but one and the same. It’s a lot easier to teach an agenda than a work of art. -- Benjamin Patch |
