Postmodernism is
a recent movement in philosophy, the humanities and the arts which rose
in the 1970s, spreading from French philosophers influenced by
Poststructuralism such as Lyotard, Deleuze, Baudrillard and Derrida.
Some have called Nietzsche the first Postmodernist, and some say that
we are still living in Postmodern times, unlike Latour who argued as an
Antimodernist that ‘modernity’ never happened. Postmodernism is
characterized by a free play of ideas, forms and influences in the wake
of Poststructuralism’s criticism of universal structures and systems.
Like Nietzsche, Postmodernism embraces self-contradiction, often in the
form of hybridization, mixing and matching formerly opposed forms,
ideas and cultures, embracing the Hegelian Other as Sartre would have
wanted. Recall that for Nietzsche creativity was not outright rejection
of morality and culture but free interpretation and use of everything.
Postmodernism
reverses conceptions that arose with the European Enlightenment and
modernity about the progress of reason and the exclusive identity of
Western culture. Recall that Hegel, Marx and Comte saw history as a
necessary unfolding of European progress through reason without the
possibility of regression. The accelerating development of science and
technology which originally supported exclusive understandings of
Western identity is also undermining the distinction via counterculture.
In the 1980s, this included the use of video technology, and then in
the 1990s it was extended considerably by the explosion of the internet.
The Bay Area, one of the most diverse places in America, is a major
center of fusion culture as well as internet innovation. While there
are countless interesting examples of Postmodern art, particularly
architecture and literature, we will focus on the major influential
Postmodern philosophers and their core ideas.
Jean-Francois Lyotard
(1924 - 1998), pronounced “leo-TAR”, is often mentioned with
Postmodernism because he was centrally concerned with the impact it was
having on thought and culture. He is of the same family as the famous
trapeze artist known for his one-piece gymnastic garb, for whom the song
The Man on the Flying Trapeze was composed and from whom the gymnastic
wear gets its name. Lyotard taught in Algeria, Brazil and California
before settling in Paris in 1968, the year of the New Left student
protests in Paris, an event that had a major impact on all four of the
French Postmodernists we will study today. Lyotard was a Post-Marxist
socialist who was critical of the Soviet Union and Stalin. Like other
Postmodernists, Lyotard argued that there will be no grand revolution
that paves the way to utopia, so the best political strategy for
progressives is to offer alternatives to the dominant culture and system
that do not seek to become dominant.
Unlike
Saussure and Lacan, Lyotard was critical of the idea that thought is
structured as a language. Like Wittgenstein, Lyotard argued that our
thinking is very much structured by and often incorporates language, but
that our mind can picture reality in various complex ways that do not
have an underlying consistent structure like language or grammar. This
is very notable in dreams, which not only show us the power of the mind
to create worlds of experience but also the fragmented and discontinuous
manner of thought and reason.
Lyotard’s
most famous work, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge
(1979), is regarded as one of the central works of Postmodernism. Much
like Levi-Strauss, Latour and Barthes, who argue that all cultures
engage in symbolic mythology, Lyotard argues that all cultures
legitimate themselves through the telling and retelling of narratives,
stories that give each culture purpose and meaning. At a time when
computer technology was just beginning to bring vast changes to
communication, thought and culture, Lyotard argues that the training of
critical minds is being eclipsed by storage of data and governments are
being replaced by multinational corporations. All of this must be
legitimated by a narrative, and so the story of the European
Enlightenment and the Age of Reason separating the West from the rest
becomes central to the creation of meaning, a metanarrative. The heroic
West, it is said, brings freedom to the world through democracy and
reason to the world through science. Lyotard compares this story of
salvation to similar metanarratives found in Christianity and Marxism.
Without the faithful retelling and circulation of this metanarrative,
Moderns, as Latour would say, would have little idea what their culture
means.
Unfortunately,
Lyotard argues, the metanarrative was unmasked for many by the horrors
of WWII, particularly the manufactured genocide at Auschwitz, which
spawned the countercultural attacks on the metanarrative of the fifties,
sixties and seventies. Recall that this was the time when Logical
Positivism was attacked by Neopragmatism and critics of science asked
questions that became debates in the studies of history of science and
philosophy of science. While all can agree that Western culture engages
in the practices of science and democracy, counterculturals begin
wondering aloud if the story of progress is merely a mask for brutality
and whether the West is merely like the rest, wallowing in ignorance and
authoritarianism. Consider Jack Kerouac, who wrote of the “beat
generation”, the beatnik youth of the fifties who turned from American
conformity, tired and disillusioned after WWII and unfaithful to the
Korean War and consumerism. Consider the Civil Rights Movement of the
sixties, that called for revolutionary changes to the American practice
of democracy which openly excluded and oppressed many Americans who were
seen as Other due to race and gender. Consider the lyrics to American
Pie, and “the day the music died”.
Lyotard
argues that Postmodernism is a playful engagement with multiple
conflicting micronarratives that have emerged in the space created by
the questioning of the grand metanarrative. He was predictably attacked
by critics who argued that Postmodernism and the end of the
metanarrative was itself a new metanarrative. Lyotard countered that
the metanarrative of the progress of the West was not dead, but actively
contradicted by some countercultures. For many, the dominance of First
World, the environmental impact of technology and the supremacist
nature of the metanarrative is unquestioned, either out of ignorance or
with regret that has no faith in an alternative. Our obsession with
precision limits the scope of our vision. It is this limitation that
Postmodern thought and art hope to counteract by disturbing the dominant
forms of cultural coherence. Critics of Lyotard and Postmodernism
continue to ask whether this is a cure for the condition or merely
another symptom. Is Postmodernism, like the narrative of modernity,
genuine liberation, or is it merely a safety valve to accommodate
scholars and gallery goers who are disenchanted but still require
entertainment?
Gilles Deleuze
(1925 - 1995), pronounced “duh-LUZE”, wrote his first books on Hume and
Nietzsche, and then several with Felix Guattari, pronounced
“ga-ta-REE”, including Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus (1972)
and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). Between these periods of early work
and later collaborations, Deleuze wrote his central work, Difference and
Repetition (1968) a year before he was recommended for a professorship
by Foucault. In the book, Deleuze argues that identity has always been
considered in contrast to difference, much like Hegel’s opposition of
Self and Other. Recall that Lacan, who attended Kojeve’s lectures on
Hegel, said that we cling to a stable self image and develop paranoid
narcissistic obsessions of Self versus Other. Deleuze argues that there
is no identity apart from or prior to difference, a point he shares
very much with his friend Derrida. The Self is only itself in terms of
its difference from the Other, as it is never entirely self-consistent.
Just as there are no absolute gaps between things, there are no pure
identities, each identity itself a gathering of differentiation.
Identity and difference are absolute ideals that are only relatively
present.
Deleuze
argues that all claims to objectivity requires repetition, which gives
the appearance of coherent concepts and practice. Consider the example
of tribal narratives chanted in song, religious rituals and Positivists
continuously using the terms ‘reason’ and ‘science’. The Dada manifesto
writer Tristan Tzara wrote, “If I cry out: Ideal, ideal, ideal,
Knowledge, knowledge, knowledge, Boomboom, boomboom, boomboom, I have
given a pretty faithful version of progress, law, morality, and all
other fine qualities that various highly intelligent men have discussed
in so many books, only to conclude that after all everyone dances to his
own personal boomboom, and that the writer is entitled to his
boomboom”.
Following
Nietzsche, also a favorite of Tzara, Deleuze says that all great
thinking is a dangerous rupture of repetition and consistent coherent
categories, a painful birth of the formerly impossible into the world of
possibility. Philosophy is not the discovery of universal truth that
Plato, Descartes and Kant sought, but the creation of new concepts.
This is much like late Wittgenstein, who said that description must
take the place of explanation. Reason is not entirely consistent with
itself, universal or objective, and it need not be to create useful
ideas. Philosophy, science and art are different cultures of the
creation of concepts and meaning. Deleuze discusses the speed of light
and absolute zero, useful in science but also conceived as practically
unattainable ideals.
Deleuze’s
works with Guattari attempt to free French thought from its obsessions
with Marx and Freud, two of the loves of Levi-Strauss and Structuralism.
Marx and Freud are useful, Deleuze argues, but as lenses and useful
conceptions, not as an orthodox underlying system. As a Post-Marxist,
Deleuze argues that capitalism is useful in that it destroyed many old
hierarchies, but now everything is dominated by the market, society
becoming a vast, desire manufacturing machine. Alternatives must be
offered, but a final revolution is in fact undesirable.
Jean Baudrillard
(1929 - 2007), pronounced “bo-dree-YAHR” was a French philosopher,
sociologist and photographer. Barthes and Bourdieu were both on his
doctoral thesis committee. In the seventies, after he became a
professor, he made many trips to America and Japan, fascinated with
consumerism, mass communication and advertising and the effect these
were having on culture and the production and consumption of meaning.
Against Marx, Baudrillard argued that society is not ultimately about
production, but consumption. I often mention with Nietzsche that
Baudrillard is much like Nietzsche, if Nietzsche had wandered through
malls, Disneyland and Vegas until he had given up hope in individual
creativity and given in to nihilism. Baudrillard is known for being the
most pessimistic of the major Postmodernists, and accepts that he is a
nihilist. He acquired a following in the late eighties and nineties.
The Wachowski siblings, who wrote the Matrix, were influenced by
Baudrillard, their Matrix an attempt to fuse the Deceiving Demon of
Descartes and the simulated hyperreality of Baudrillard. In one scene
Neo, the protagonist, uses a book by Baudrillard to hide items on his
desk.
For
Baudrillard, cultures seek a full closure for meaning and truth which
always escapes their grasp. The meaning of the thing is never the thing
itself, the sign and its significance always beyond its signification.
Following Nietzsche, Baudrillard argues that we are seduced by meaning,
and that all acceptance of interpretation is seduction. While
seduction is not necessarily the worst of things, in modern commercial
society the seduction has become a sickly, unfulfilling hypnosis, the
dull lull offered by hours of television and endless consumption of
manufactured products. Baudrillard argues that we no longer live in
what can be called simply reality, but rather in a simulation, a virtual
reality, what he calls the Hyperreal. Our manufactured hyperreality is
reality, but mass produced, much like the art of Andy Warhol in the
sixties, such as his screen prints of Marilyn Monroe and tomato soup
cans, which Warhol displayed in galleries on shelves as consumer goods.
The
more we try to manufacture reality to complete it and enclose it, the
more hyperreal it becomes, both less than and more than real, and thus
unreal. Baudrillard says that pornography is hyper-sex. Similarly,
fast food can be called hyper-food, television can be called
hyper-experience, and advertising can be called hyper-seduction, the
mass production of desire as Lyotard argues. Baudrillard calls these
‘simulacra’ (each a ‘simulacrum’ singularly), simulations or copies.
The copy is real, but it is also, in reality, a knock-off. I cannot
help but think of an experience I had in LA that I can still see quite
clearly many years later. I flew down to visit my friend who moved to
LA for college, and on his TV I saw news coverage of the Lakergirl
tryouts (Baudrillard would be amused to know that Lakergirl, is
apparently in spellcheck!). In a gymnasium, thousands of young women,
all wearing the same outfit, did a side-stepping dance, forming a
horrifying conveyor-belt of the beauty-image feminists discuss, fifty
feet deep and with no end to length in sight, moving past the camera as
if without end. That is simulacra.
For
Baudrillard, there can be no Marxist revolution, and there is no
possibility of change. Even terrorism ceases to be symbolic of anything
meaningful. Baudrillard notes that the Twin Towers, notoriously felled
on September 11th, were a duplication, the tallest buildings in one of
the most significant cities in history, standing above all as a
replicated pair, a monument to replication. Baudrillard controversially
argued that the First Gulf War never happened, in that the public saw
little to nothing of it and the military massive bombing campaign was
more of a ruse to convince itself and the public that there was a great
enemy to oppose. Some critics compared this to Berkeley’s idealism, a
denial of the physical reality of the event, but Baudrillard responded
that, insofar as reality is a social construct, more Hegelian than
Berkeleyan, our reality is determined by mass media and the method of
its concealing and revealing. In contrast to the Gulf War, September
11th was for Baudrillard framed as an absolute confrontation between the
West and Islam, between the hero and the villain, but this is actually
globalization unable to speak of itself, criticize itself or offer any
alternative.
While
Nietzsche saw all great meaning as individual creation, Baudrillard
sees this as increasingly impossible in a self-referential mass-produced
culture. Like Levi-Strauss and Mauss, as well as Bataille, Baudrillard
argued that cultures are founded on exchange, and when everything
exchanged is mass-produced, things are more symbolic than they are
individual objects. Drinking a pepsi can be somewhat satisfying, but it
is more about the signification that it satisfies than its actual
satisfaction for the individual drinking it. It signals to others that
you are satisfied more than it satisfies. Culture is driven by
consumption, and the hyper-consumption of unnecessary products creates a
reality and life experience that is more symbolic and mythological than
real and significant. Baudrillard agrees with Lyotard that without the
metanarrative of Western progress culture would not know what it means,
but he argues that this has already happened, and history, insofar as
it is projected into the future as Heidegger saw it, is over. This does
not mean nothing will happen, but that each event loses individual
significance. Much like Schopenhauer, Baudrillard has no faith in
individuality, but advocates passive ecstatic acceptance of the
spectacle, in all of its meaningless grandeur.
Donna Haraway
(1944 - still alive, suckers), is today a professor at UC Santa Cruz in
the History of Consciousness department along with Angela Davis. She
is famous for arguing that we are all cyborgs. Recall that Heidegger
saw technology as an intimate part of human existence and tools as
genuine extension of self. Haraway suggests that we create a modern
myth to guide our lives in the age of computers, the myth that we are
now cyborgs, half human and half machine. While much of ancient and
modern mythology is concerned with purity and coherence, Haraway
suggests we substitute an understanding of hybridity, of the
technological otherness of modern humanity. Haraway, a third wave
feminist, is also interested in the hybrid nature of humanity in terms
of gender, female and male co-defining each other.
Haraway’s
new myth is often considered in light of Postmodern science fiction of
the eighties. Consider the film Blade Runner, in which androids are
almost indistinguishable from humans, which inspired William Gibson’s
famous classic Neuromancer, the book which coined the term ‘cyberspace’,
the first of the cyberpunk genre. Blade Runner and Neuromancer are
central examples of Postmodern fiction. It was at this time that
Haraway argued that we are all cyborgs, infused with technology such
that our lives and ideology are intertwined with it.
Jacques Derrida
(1930 - 2004) is, much like Foucault, famous for his Poststructuralist
take on the work of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Saussure, Levi-Strauss and
many others we have studied, his philosophy known as Deconstruction.
Like Foucault, Derrida takes systems apart to show the complex workings
of pieces that are not set in stone but maintained through binary
divisions that are always somewhat arbitrary, but like Barthes, Derrida
was more concerned with texts than with institutions. Derrida grew up
Jewish in French Algeria, an adolescence that helped him recognize
marginalized perspectives, and he was expelled from high school on his
first day for being Jewish while France was occupied by the Nazis.
Derrida decided not to attend the segregated Jewish high school and
enjoyed reading Nietzsche, Rousseau, Camus and Sartre instead. He
completed his thesis on Husserl and came to America to study at Harvard.
He taught in France until 1986, when he came to California to teach at
UC Irvine until his death.
In
1966, Derrida gained a following after giving a lecture at a conference
on Structuralism at Johns Hopkins, where Peirce taught Dewey, with
Lacan and many other prominent scholars in attendance. In his lecture,
called Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,
Derrida argued that systems must center and organize themselves to be
coherent and limit “freeplay”, but there is also freedom for
substitution and exchange within the system itself. The center of the
structure is within yet also outside the structure, governing what is
permissible within the structure but ungoverned by the structure itself.
The center is, paradoxically, the coherence of the structure, but the
center is free to be incoherent. We desire coherence and demand this of
structures, but just like Wittgenstein’s child at the blackboard, we
cannot center the center, cannot make the coherence itself coherent, as
this results in an infinite regress.
We
are desirous and anxious, as Heidegger argued, and so we play social
games within systems seeking stability and coherence, placing ourselves
at stake within the game and making the game a presence for ourselves.
Consider the presence of science, and that as Derrida was giving his
lecture Positivists were under attack by Neopragmatists and losing faith
in the complete coherence of mathematics, logic and science, staking
things more on “common sense”. Derrida argues that games and structures
are constantly being recentered, like a football game, recentered
sequentially at a series of locations. The center is constantly being
re-centered, the focus of activity always shifting to something else
that was not the focus. Just as a word or concept is substituted for
the thing it signifies and metaphors substitute one thing for another, a
new center and focus is always being substituted for the old. Derrida
claims that the history of metaphysics, science, structuralist
anthropology and the West is a progression of substituting one metaphor
for another, much like Kuhn’s paradigm shift. Consider that the West is
identified and re-identified with reason, freedom and science to center
its identity.
To
ask about the center of the center, the structure of the structure, is
to throw things into question and face anxiety, as the center is not
permanently centered, the structure not permanently structured. The
structure is also paradoxically a rupture, a freeplay of substitution
that cannot limit its activity of limitation. We cannot make the system
a permanence, can never bring it fully into presence, as there is
always absence, always the infinite regress of the horizon without end.
There is no focus that brings an end to our refocusing as we move along
with the game in which our faith is at stake. The meaning of a system
of meaning is never absolute, as there is no sameness without difference
and no presence without absence. No structure, not even Structuralism,
can fully be structured, as structures are systems of substitution and
play.
Derrida
names Nietzsche as the one who called metaphysics and morality into
question, causing a great rupture and shift for those who seek the
structure of structures, the thinking underneath thought. Derrida also
calls attention to the work of Freud, in which the self is not the self,
and Heidegger, for whom being-there is both being-here and
being-elsewhere, the presence that is life determined by the absence
that is death. These critical thinkers must circle themselves, using
thought to criticize thought, using concepts to criticize conceptions,
fashioning new systems to criticize system-building. Similarly,
Saussure and Semiology had to use the word and concept ‘sign’ to signify
signs and signification. Levi-Strauss’ Structuralism was thus an
impossible task to complete, even though its work was significant and
worth the effort. As soon as we question human systems, we are engaging
in systematization that can itself be questioned, but only when not
engaging in it. Each great thinker questions the last, as Heidegger did
of Nietzsche and Derrida does of Heidegger.
Derrida
argues that the current questioning of metaphysics and meaning is bound
up with the critique of ethnocentrism, of Europe establishing itself as
the West and the questioning of this identity. Levi-Strauss’
anthropology, which called all ethnic differences into question by
seeking the underlying similarity, is a branch of philosophy and
science, which call all differences into question by seeking the
underlying universal patterns. As philosophy questions metaphysics and
science questions biological ethnicity, they simultaneously and
paradoxically establish and pronounce the identity of philosophy,
science and the West, to separate the philosophical from the
unphilosophical, the scientific from the unscientific, and the West from
the rest. Derrida argues that we cannot escape this paradox, just as
neither Nietzsche nor Heidegger could fully escape metaphysics or closed
conceptions of truth, but we can be careful and critical, responsible
for the strategies we employ in the game. Clearly, Derrida is calling
ethnocentrism into question as a strategy. Philosophy, science and the
ethnocentric West are all centers of systematic coherent activity, but
at the center they are free to be paradoxical and incoherent,
establishing distinctions and identities while seeking the similar and
universal.
Levi-Strauss
had sought to find the underlying universal rules of culture, his
central example the prohibition of incest, sexual relationships within
the family. Derrida argues that as soon as this is provided as a
universal rule, it calls itself into question. If incest is universally
wrong, then how can it be a scandal? The rule can be and is violated,
possibly in all human cultures, and so it cannot be said to be a
universal human rule. If it could not be violated, it would not be a
rule at all, would have no meaning or direction for human activity. The
violation of a rule is a condition of its possibility, and thus there
can be no universal rules, neither in metaphysics nor cultural practice.
Levi-Strauss could not separate unchanging universal nature from
various particular cultures, just as Wittgenstein could not separate
logic from various contingent games.
Derrida
argues that, just as Levi-Strauss sought to free philosophy from
metaphysics while using concepts of Kant and Hegel, we should question
what systems of thought and our own thinking include in identities and
exclude in distinctions, as our identities will always include
differentiation and our distinctions will always exclude underlying
similarities. With every thought we distinguish, just as with every act
we displace. We can use concepts from the entire range of human
thought critically and freely. Derrida notes that, in the later work of
Levi-Strauss, he questioned his own Structuralism as mythology, a
mythology of all mythology. This doubling back and reversal does not
result in nothing, but like any questioning produces answers and further
questioning of its answers. Thinking continues to shift, and requires
no permanent center. Any presence can be questioned as an absence, just
as the doubt of this questioning becomes a new faith, center, and
presence of the answering.
The
many works of Derrida that followed this lecture, as well as the work
of many Deconstructionists following Derrida, put the freeplay with
meaning on display, showing that one can always double back and displace
itself, showing that dominant meanings can be questioned and
marginalized. While this has angered many scientists such as Alan Sokal
and Analytic philosophers such as John Searle, who see Deconstruction
as a worthless and unproductive activity, Derrida argued that like
Nietzsche we should be free to turn from stabilizing to destabilizing
truth and culture as we see fit to give birth to new truths and
cultures. Rorty argued that Derrida’s work is genuine philosophy
against other American philosophers.
The
best of this debate is captured in Derrida’s book Limited INC, a
collection of several texts that document the heated exchange between
Derrida and Searle. In 1972, Derrida deconstructed and criticized the
work of Austin’s Speech Act theory, showing inherent tensions and
contradictions within the Analytic Positivist conception of literal and
objective meaning. Derrida asks whether ‘communication’ as a word can
have a set meaning as the vehicle for all meaning, and whether there is
literal and objective meaning in communication, devoid of all metaphor.
Meaning depends on context, and context is never entirely determined.
Part of the context of any communication is the absence of the
receiver, who is always at some distance from the communicator or
communication would not be required. One would only write a text if its
readers were not present and did not already share its understanding.
This absence and distance allows for variation and iterability, which
Derrida suggests comes from the Sanskrit root ‘itara’, or other, like
the Other of Hegel. This allows for the “death of the author” of
Barthes, as the receiver can use the communication in various ways in
the absence of the communicator.
Derrida
argues that every act of communication is an act of force that changes,
disturbs and breaks the context in which it is framed or it is
meaningless and without purpose. While I am rebinding these words for
you now, making them mean what they meant before, I am also telling you
something new, and thus changing the context of language and its use, or
this would not be meaningful. Thus, while communication can be
meaningful, it cannot be objective, cannot be given a stable context
which fully situates its meaning. Consider that if we repeat something
again to someone, this has a different meaning as a reiteration, as a
retelling that had to be retold, which changes the context just as the
context was changed by the initial telling. Derrida argues that Austin
is right to say that every speech act is a performance, much like the
gender identity of Judith Butler who was influenced by both Austin and
Derrida. Derrida argues that Nietzsche and Austin are right to see
communication as an act of force, but unlike Nietzsche, Austin believes
that the meaning of a speech act can be literal and others can
objectively understand its entire intentional meaning, as if we can call
all of consciousness before ourselves and know all of the intention and
meaning in an act of communication.
What
would it be to entirely understand what a speaker intends in an
utterance? Can the speaker herself entirely understand what they
intend? Freud and Nietzsche would say no. Neither the intention of the
speaker nor the context of the act can be exhaustively understood, nor
need it be for the utterance to be meaningful as genuine communication.
Derrida criticizes Austin for insisting that when we use language
“normally” and “seriously” we use it literally, and any abnormal use of
language is “parasitic” on its normal use. For Austin, puns and
abstract poetry are abnormal uses of language that intend to use
language as it is not normally intended. Derrida argues that language
and meaning are always abnormal, as is their context, and Austin is
assuming that language and meaning are fixed and permanent, writing,
“the intention animating the utterance will never be through and
through present to itself and to its content”.
Derrida
often compares the absence and presence of objectivity and absolute
meaning to the absence and presence of God in Christian theology,
accusing Analytic philosophers such as Austin and Searle of blind (and
Sartre would say, bad) faith. Just as Christian theologians argued that
God teleologically created the world and established its true meaning
with full knowledge, Austin argues that a speaker creates speech and
thus fully knows its intention. Derrida argues that Austin, like a
theologian, has faith that the identity of the source is capable of
omniscience. Derrida, as could be expected, admires the skeptical
visions of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mysticism rather than the
dogmatic teleology of orthodox theologians.
Searle,
Austin’s student and a proponent of Speech Act theory, fired back at
Derrida in 1977 with his essay Reiterating the Differences, criticizing
Derrida’s criticism as superficial and irrational. Searle argues that
understanding an utterance is recognizing the intention of the author
when the author says what the author means, the standard and serious
cases. Searle writes, “the speaker and hearers are masters of the sets
of rules we call the rules of language, and these rules...allow for for
the repeated application of the same rule”. Searle assumes that there
are set rules, they can be fully mastered, and can be identically
repeated such that they are fully recognized and understood. You may
sense Derrida’s response as an absent presence.
Derrida
replied to Searle with his essay Limited Inc a b c..., and he asked
Searle if he could publish their three pieces together as a discussion.
Searle refused, and Derrida included a summary of Reiterating the
Differences between his own two pieces and published these as Limited
INC in 1988. Derrida begins by saying that he cannot be sure if Searle
will read his reply, or whether will but will not take it seriously.
Derrida also notes that it is impossible to fully recreate his debate
with Searle as all of its pieces cannot be gathered into any text, and
Searle is unwilling to have his piece published because he is well aware
that he cannot fix its meaning and significance. Because Derrida is
the one who is gathering the text, Searle fears its placement in a text
and context of Derrida’s choosing.
Derrida
notes his friendship and correspondence with Dreyfus, a major
interpreter of Heidegger and Searle’s fellow professor at Berkeley, and
that Derrida himself cannot know how much of Dreyfus or his
communication with Searle is contained in Searle’s piece. I myself,
while an undergraduate at Berkeley, witnessed a joint talk by Dreyfus
and Searle about the connection between Searle’s concept of the
background and Heidegger’s flow, and was appalled when Searle began by
saying that he had never read Heidegger and was simply going to explain
his own work. Dreyfus is renowned as America’s greatest expert on
Heidegger, and Searle could have talked with him about Heidegger at any
number of times before giving the talk, which he did not feel it
important to do.
Derrida
accuses Searle of misunderstanding and possibly never reading the work
of Husserl on intentionality, nor understanding Derrida’s own criticism
of Austin. While Searle’s understanding is impressively limited, even
Searle cannot fully limit the meaning of his own utterances. Note that I
use Searle’s own previous speech against him myself, as does Derrida,
who argues that Searle cannot give a coherent account of the separation
of “serious” and “unserious” cases, and then proceeds through the rest
of his essay to repeat again and again, “But let’s be serious”, showing
that the more it is said the less it is serious. Apparently, Searle does
not consider the work of Heidegger, Derrida, or even his colleague
Dreyfus to be serious. Consider that Searle is famous for a metaphor,
the Chinese Room thought experiment, and not for arguing that meaning is
intentional or can be literal and fully understood, already an Analytic
staple.
Derrida
says that he is going to argue with Sarl, his own understanding of
Searle’s intention and position. Sarl, a new mythical being, argues
that Derrida misunderstands Austin, misreading and misstating Austin’s
work. Much like the incest taboo of Levi-Strauss, Derrida says that
this is evidence that even Austin can be misunderstood and variously
understood, something that Sarl denies of serious communication while
holding Austin’s work to be the serious truth. Derrida argues that,
like Nietzsche, Austin saw speech as a performance of intention,
deriving its meaning not from its absolute truth value but from its
utilitarian value. Derrida is merely attempting to show Sarl the
unlimited and various uses one can make with “serious” communication.
It is always possible to use language and understand meaning
differently. Unfortunately, Sarl believes that Derrida is opposed to
all permanence and coherence of language use, though Derrida is merely
arguing that this is always relative, never absolute. Apparently, Sarl
is in fact arguing with Derridarl, another mythical creature. While
some have accused Derrida, like Nietzsche, of being a nihilist, Derrida
argues, like Foucault, that the binary dichotomies of true/false,
intentional/unintentional, serious/playful and others can be and often
should be overturned, not to banish all meaning but to encourage its
growth and renewal.
