The Deconstructive Turn (Routledge Revivals)

Essays in the Rhetoric of Philosophy

Christopher Norris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• eBook ISBN: 9781136998935
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism

What might be the outcome for philosophy if its texts were subjected to the powerful techniques of rhetorical close-reading developed by current deconstructionist literary critics? When first published in 1983, Christopher Norris' book was the first to explore such questions in the context of modern analytic and linguistic philosophy, opening up a new and challenging dimension of inter-disciplinary study and creating a fresh and productive dialogue between philosophy and literary theory.

1
Deconstruction and ‘ordinary language’: speech versus writing in the text of philosophy

I

There might seem little chance of any fruitful exchange between Anglo-American philosophy of language and those developments in the wake of Saussure which currently go under the name of post-structuralism. Certainly the two traditions are worlds apart in terms of philosophical descent and governing conventions. Saussure’s thinking about language can be seen as the upshot of a rationalist epistemology which—in a properly Cartesian spirit—suspends all the notions of empirical self-evidence and sets out to construct an alternative system possessed of its own internal logic.¹ This bracketing of common sense assumptions is taken as the minimal starting-point for any form of knowledge which hopes to advance beyond naïve certitude or unreflecting positivism. Such is Saussure’s insistence that linguistic science be founded on a clean disciplinary break between parole, or the speech-stuff of everyday experience, and langue as the network of articulated contrasts and resemblances existing outside and beyond the speaker’s immediate grasp. This act of divorce is further ratified by the ‘arbitrary’ nature of the sign, the fact—as Saussure argued—that there cannot exist any natural or proper relation between signifier and signified, the word as material token of meaning and the concept it conveys.

Intuition prompts us to believe otherwise, as does a whole tradition of philosophy going back at least to Plato’s Cratylus. The ‘naturalist’ position comes of a sense that language, or more specifically spoken language, takes rise in some intimate region of awareness where meaning and thought are indissolubly merged. The idea of speech as self-presence goes along with a belief in the ability of thought to arrive at an authentic knowledge beyond reach of doubt because transparently open to inward self-scrutiny. Jacques Derrida has shown how this ‘phonocentric’ bias operates across the widest divergences of western philosophic thought.² To register the force of Derrida’s critique would involve much more than simply confronting Anglo-American empiricism with yet another species of high-flown French dialectics. The point is that Derrida’s techniques of deconstruction are exerted just as forcefully on Descartes, Saussure or Lévi-Strauss as on thinkers in the ‘other’ tradition, including—most recently—Austin and Searle. What Derrida calls the ‘logocentric epoch’ of western thought, and elsewhere its ‘metaphysical closure’, is a kind of aboriginal and endless swerve into forms of mystification so deeply ingrained that they cut across all the usual boundaries of discipline and culture.

In this, as in much besides, he carries on the Nietzschean project of unmasking the claims of systematic knowledge, showing them up as elaborate schemes for preserving and disguising the intellectual will-to-power. Derrida likewise takes over the emphasis which Nietzsche placed upon figurative language as both a source of delusion and a means—the only one available—of dismantling and exposing the ruses of philosophy. In a sentence much quoted by the current deconstructors, Nietzsche described truth as ‘a mobile marching army of metaphors, metonymies and anthropomorphisms…truths are illusions of which one has forgotten that they are illusions …’.³ Derrida applies this deconstructive insight with the added force and leverage provided by a post-Saussurean critique of the sign and its metaphysical lineage.

This is not the place for an adequate discussion of Derrida’s textual strategies, as brought to bear on philosophers from Plato to Heidegger, as well as on those literary texts which he calls to witness for their power of rhetorically subverting the sovereign claim of philosophy. I have made that attempt elsewhere,⁴ albeit in the knowledge of Derrida’s repeated warning that deconstruction is a vigilant activity of thought, and not a system capable of summary description. My purpose here is to offer some comparisons, or suggestive points of contact, between Derrida’s thinking and certain varieties of Anglo-American linguistic philosophy. It might appear that any such attempt must always come up against a barrier of mutual incomprehension. A gulf has seemed fixed between the two traditions, confirmed at every point by deep-grained differences in what was thought to constitute ‘serious’ philosophy. Attitudes to language are at the heart of this problem, increasingly so since structuralism asserted its hold over French critical thought, and British philosophy took the ‘linguistic turn’ which defined its modern character. On the face of it there is small hope of useful dialogue between exponents of ordinary-language philosophy and those, like Derrida, who set out to deconstruct the very notions of communicable meaning and answerable method.

There are several good reasons for revising this ostrich-like perspective. For one thing, as I have argued, Derrida’s critique of western logocentrism cuts both ways. It takes in not only the ‘empiricist’ delusion (that knowledge of the world can be achieved undistorted by the figural snares of language), but also its ‘rationalist’ counterpart, that clear and distinct ideas can be arrived at by suspending reality and following the path of Cartesian principled doubt. In fact these two persuasions figure in Derrida’s writing as virtual sides of a single coin, the currency of which is endlessly sustained by a constant exchange of metaphorical values. Thus Derrida can deconstruct the materialist themes of a philosopher like Condillac⁵ as well as the idealist or metaphysical residues secreted in Platonic and Christian tradition. Their relationship is most pointedly defined in Derrida’s several texts on Husserl and the ‘phenomenological reduction’.⁶ Such attempts to provide an indubitable grounding of knowledge and perception must always ignore what Derrida so shrewdly brings out, namely the differential structure—the alterity or radical displacement—which inhabits all meaning. Derrida presses this insight of structural linguistics to a point far beyond its methodological place in Saussure’s original programme. He turns it against those philosophies of presence, from Plato to Husserl, which take as their basis an appeal to the pure self-evidence of reason. Husserl saw it as his task to ward off scepticism by providing the positivist sciences of his day with a critical or reflective grounding in transcendental logic. Derrida’s reading effectively dismantles both sides of this alliance, the pre-reflective grasp of empirical knowledge and the rationalist project which supposedly comes to its aid.

From a deconstructionist standpoint, therefore, the text-book account of philosophic history lies open to a wholesale revision which would constantly double across the boundaries of ‘rationalist’ and ‘empiricist’ thought. Richard Rorty is one of the few Anglo-American philosophers to have taken up this challenge and measured its implications. In his book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature Rorty argues that the quest for knowledge and epistemological certitude has always been captive to its own engrossing metaphors. Chief among them is that of the mind as mirror, the ‘glassy essence’ of the soul, wherein are to be found all the representations of external reality. ‘It is pictures rather than propositions, metaphors rather than statements, which determine most of our philosophical convictions.’⁷ It thus becomes the task of philosophy to legitimate this picture of its work by repressing or forgetting the swerve into metaphor which first produced—and still sustains—its discourse. Rorty is saying, in short, that traditional epistemology rests on a mistake, a fruitful mistake in its peculiar way but one which can only lead to repeated blind-spots of paradox and error. He also makes it clear that this picture of philosophic reason is one held in common by rationalist and empiricist traditions alike. Descartes and Locke subscribe to the same great illusion, one consequence of which is the seeming exclusiveness of their two philosophies. ‘It is as if the tabula rasa were perpetually under the gaze of the unblinking Eye of the Mind—nothing, as Descartes said, being nearer to the mind than itself.’⁸ There exists a deep and systematically-misleading collusion between Lockean empiricism and the rational self-evidence of Cartesian method.

That Derrida figures only marginally in Rorty’s book is no doubt a matter of strategic emphasis. He writes with Anglo-American philosophy in view, and with the principal object of weaning it away from some of its deep-laid preoccupations. To rest his case too heavily on so alien and threatening a presence would risk incurring the same response—the indifference or marginalization—which has mostly been Derrida’s lot among the professional philosophers. Elsewhere, in a number of articles, Rorty has written most persuasively of Derrida’s significance and the questions he poses to ‘normative’ or mainstream philosophy.⁹ The central issue, Rorty argues, is that of philosophical style, in a sense more crucial and encompassing than most philosophers are willing to entertain. The resistance to deconstruction stems largely from this unwillingness. That the discipline of thought is always and everywhere bound up with a practice of style—that philosophy, as Rorty puts it, is ‘a kind of writing’—cannot but seem a subversive idea to those engaged (as they believe) with pure conceptual analysis.

This is what Derrida perceives as the effect of ‘logocentric’ thinking down through the history of western philosophy. He sets his deconstructive sights against the ruling metaphysic which subjugates language to thought, rhetoric to logic and style to the notion of a plenitude of meaning, a pristine intelligibility immune from the effects of writing. Rorty likewise rejects the protocols of orthodox linguistic philosophy in favour of a conscious, even artful, play with stylistic possibilities. At the same time he implies that it is not just a matter of choosing one’s tradition, siding (say) with Nietzsche and Heidegger as against the normative regime of stylistic repression. Rather it is a question of seeing that both these options come down to a choice of philosophic style, a commitment to certain operative metaphors and modes of representation. The difference then lies in the extent to which the thinker either elects to ignore or actively embraces and exploits this universal predicament.

Rorty’s suggestions help to prepare for what may yet turn out to be a profitable exchange between deconstruction and the issues thrown up by recent linguistic philosophy. The point can be made from a slightly different angle by taking up his tentative distinction between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ styles of philosophic discourse. ‘Normal’ philosophy proceeds on the assumption that knowledge is a business of orderly and systematic thinking, an enterprise built upon firm foundations of rational enquiry. Descartes, Kant and the logical positivists are among the chief examplars of this long tradition. ‘Abnormal’ philosophy, on the other hand, rejects the appeal of absolute knowledge and sets up to demonstrate—by various means—the delusions of systematic method. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Derrida stand as clear examples of this dissident tradition, with Hegel as a more ambiguous figure, torn between the claims of system and the drive toward deconstructing all systems other than his own. The hallmarks of ‘abnormal’ philosophy are a conscious virtuosity of style, a constant dealing in paradox and a will to problematize the relation between language and thought. The corresponding features of its normative counterpart are a disregard of style except as a means of efficient communication; a mistrust of paradox unless firmly held within argumentative bounds; and a belief that language can and should faithfully reflect the processes of thought.

II

It would clearly be misleading to set up ‘linguistic philosophy’ as if that term denoted a single or well-defined body of opinion. The debate has been mainly between those (like J.L.Austin) who repose their confidence in the wisdom and sufficiency of ordinary language, and those who look beyond it for some logic or conceptual grammar redeemed from its natural imprecision. Wittgenstein of course faced about in mid-career from a logical-analytic standpoint to one which acknowledged the sanctions of ordinary usage and the various ways in which language makes sense apart from the requirements of strict propositional logic. This latter persuasion was erected by Austin and his followers into a high point of principle, a belief that the perennial problems of philosophy could be conjured away by meticulous attention to the unnoticed subtleties of everyday usage.

At the same time there were those, like Gilbert Ryle, who adopted a kind of midway position, attending to the habits and conventions of ‘ordinary language’ but quick to point out where they generated symptoms of conceptual strain or paradox. Such are the ‘category mistakes’ which Ryle detects behind various cases of misleading common usage. His attempt to exorcise ‘the ghost in the machine’, the concept of mind as a disembodied realm of obscure private happenings, is a clear case in point.¹⁰ It represents not only an attack on Cartesian dualism but a principled refusal to go along with normal and intuitive ways of expressing the mind-body distinction. Common usage for Ryle has nothing like the sacrosanct authority and wisdom that Austin would accord it. The bewitchment of intelligence which Wittgenstein blamed upon the specialized jargon of philosophy can equally result from ordinary language with its unexamined bases in metaphor and myth. His distinctive style, with its fondness for paradox and homely but unsettling examples, is typical of Ryle’s ambivalent attitiude toward commonsense or everyday usage.

There is, I would suggest, a very real affinity between Ryle’s philosophy and Derrida’s practice of textual deconstruction. They both start out from the assumption that language often runs into blind-spots of paradox—aporia in Derrida’s Aristotelian terminology—which prevent it from effectually meaning what it says, or saying what it means. Logic, grammar and rhetoric are not simply different aspects of language but disjunct dimensions which can enter into conflict and radically undermine each other’s authority. Paul de Man puts the case most succinctly in his book Allegories of Reading:

The grammatical model…becomes rhetorical not when we have, on the one hand, a literal meaning and on the other hand a figural meaning, but when it is impossible to decide by grammatical or other linguistic devices which of the two meanings (that can be entirely incompatible) prevails. Rhetoric radically suspends logic and opens up vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration.¹¹

De Man goes on to discuss the tension between ‘constative’ and ‘performative’ language in various writers from Rousseau to Nietzsche and Proust. His argument is that meaning is always undone by the radical uncertainty which leaves it suspended between statement and suasion, logical form and rhetorical force. Furthermore, this predicament can only be described in a language of analytic form which apparently states the deconstructionist case, and thus falls prey to its own critique, as yet another case of rhetorical doubling and delusion. The most one can achieve is to recognize—like Nietzsche, or indeed the ‘early’ Wittgenstein—that language cannot both say and show what it means. ‘Considered as persuasion, rhetoric is performative but when considered as a system of tropes, it deconstructs its own performance.’¹²

Ryle sees philosophy in a similar light as the seeking-out of paradox, or blocks to understanding, by a process of linguistic critique. On the other hand it would clearly be unwise to press this analogy too far. Ryle is basically a commonsense philosopher, turning up problems in the conduct of language but always with a view to sorting them out and avoiding needless mystification. In Rorty’s terms his discourse belongs to the ‘normal’ or rational-constructive tradition, making use of such ‘abnormal’ instances as serve to reinforce this guiding principle. De Man, like Derrida, pitches his critique at a very different level, arguing that language always and inevitably falls into traps of its own metaphysical engendering. From his Nietzschean perspective logic itself is called into doubt by the deconstructive questioning which treats all claims to knowledge as products of a rhetorical will-to-power. All the same, with these essential qualifications in mind, there is still sufficient ground for comparing the two epistemologies and pursuing what might be seen as a belated encounter.

Ryle’s preoccupations are set out most clearly in his essay ‘Philosophical arguments’, delivered as an inaugural lecture at Oxf...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Deconstruction and ‘ordinary language’: speech versus writing in the text of philosophy
• 2 The insistence of the letter: textuality and metaphor in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy
• 3 ‘That the truest philosophy is the most feigning’: Austin on the margins of literature
• 4 Fictions of authority: narrative and viewpoint in Kierkegaard’s writing
• 5 Image and parable: readings of Walter Benjamin
• 6 Forked paths to Xanadu: parables of reading in Livingston Lowes
• 7 Deconstruction, naming and necessity: some logical options
• Methodological postscript: deconstruction versus interpretation?
• Appendix: on Henning Fenger’s ‘Kierkegaard: the myths and their origins’
• Notes
• Name index
• Subject index