245. Postmodern Theorists: Disappointing Friends of Socrates

 
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Socrates, facing death, asked his friends to punish his sons for him if they thought they knew something when they didn't.  And that, it occurred to me after I began to understand their work, is what Jacques Derrida and other French postmodernists were doing, punishing us academic followers of Socrates for thinking our knowledge was more solid than it was.  Because the language we expressed it in wasn't as solid as we thought it was.  So there they were, friends of Socrates, and therefore friends of ours.  Though hard to understand and hell to keep company with, they had an undeniable attraction.

Easier to understand and with a more admissible attraction were the American postmodernists like Stanley Fish.  He was bound to appeal to academic traditionalists like me because, though I was slow to discover it, we shared a common foundation.  That's a wonderful thing to find when everybody you know is either a foundationalist or an anti-foundationalist, and firing across the gap.

What Fish made his ultimate appeal to — his supporting ground, his settler of disagreements, his final philosopher, his supreme court, that is, his foundation — was a group of human beings.  He called his group an "interpretive community," I called mine "educated gentlemen."  Neither one of us felt a need to appeal past them to anything deeper, like a "reality."  There we were, philosophical friends.

And sure enough, just as in daily life, one attraction opens your eyes to others.  In the Derrideans deconstructing philosophical work I could see 1940s semanticists dissecting propaganda releases.  It was all rhetorical analysis, showing what the orator or sophist was up to, with Derrida just operating at a higher level, on more imposing figures.  He wasn't going as far beyond the New Critics as his young admirers thought he was, but he was going a distance that can be admired.

Eyes opened, I could see something more in Stanley Fish, something that would let us take him with us right into the heart of the Socratic enterprise.  He put the response of the reader ahead of literary form, ahead of biography, ahead of history.   The student who tested everybody by what they taught him about the good life was free to dismiss scholars and critics.  This postmodernist was not just licensing the student of the sixties, he was liberating the follower of Socrates.  

Ah, another claim for liberation.  Meaning another vagueness.  To avoid the vagueness let's look closely into one of today's classrooms.  A Milton course.  We've got a student who, following Socrates, is making the usual measurement: "How much does this contribute to the good life?"  He reads Comus and gets nothing.  It's a turkey, a bore.  Too much high-minded instruction, too much spectacle and pageantry, too elegant.  The scholar his teacher refers him to does what historical scholars customarily do for ignorant minds: fills them with knowledge of time and place.   The times expected elegance, the occasion called for high-minded instruction (the sponsor of the play wanted his participating children to learn the classical virtues), and the aristocratic audience loved pageantry.  The critic his teacher refers him to tells him that he must understand that this is a masque, a genre in which you always get spectacle.  But the student inspired by Socrates and fortified by Stanley Fish says, "I live in different times, I'm not a child, I'm not an aristocrat, and masques do nothing for me."  He is the five-year-old speaking to his parents in the old New Yorker cartoon:  "I say it's spinach and I say the hell with it." 

There's not much philosophical weight there, as in most cases there won't be, but look what happens when that student comes to Paradise Lost.  He sees Christ portrayed as a military leader and throws the book across the room.  The knowledgeable academics his teacher refers him to tell him that before he judges anything, from a corkscrew to a cathedral, he ought to ask what it's for.   ­Paradise Lost is an epic, and epics display heroic warfare.  So, now that he's knowledgeable he ought to quiet down and accept Christ as the military leader he has to be in an epic. 

The follower of Socrates says nothing doing.  A God like that doesn't fit into the vision of the good religious life that he has so far put together.  He thinks that Christ carrying a sword, and angels clad in armor, and spirits getting wounded, and heroic military action itself, are all spinach, and he says the hell with them.

And that's reader-response, and that's the Socratic enterprise, and there's Plato giving his blessing and Stanley Fish issuing his license.  Peace with Fish and peace with Barbara Herrnstein Smith who spoke for Fish in the Modern Language Association (see note).  Peace in the postmodern world. 

Can it last?  Let's answer with a thought experiment.  Let's construct a student out of Fish's theory (you can do this yourself now, using Post #240) and put him right into Socrates' circle.  See how he'll do. 

Suppose we choose the circle of gentlemen gathering around Socrates as his execution approaches.  Crito arrives first on the supposed date.  Let's lower our student into his place.  "No," Socrates says to him, "we shouldn't accept popular opinion — which is that his friends should help him escape — but should follow 'the best course that reason offers.'" 

Will the Smith Crito agree?  Let us assume that it is his "behavioral tendency" (Smith, Post #240) to do so.  They proceed to inquire into the course of reason, beginning with a principle that they have established in earlier discussions: that one should never willingly do wrong under any circumstances.  Plato-Crito, after prompting, agrees to what this proposition entails: that one should not even "do wrong when one is wronged"; it can't be right to "do an injury in retaliation" — though "most people" believe that it can.  Once it is demonstrated to him, Plato-Crito is held by logical implication.  Smith-Crito is held by whatever makes an inclination recurrent.  Assume that the inclination holds, and he agrees to what the logic requires.

Then from Socrates:  "Ought one to fulfill all one's agreements, provided they are right?" or is one free to break them?  Plato-Crito, held by his bond, agrees; we'll assume that Smith-Crito, held by his, agrees.  Socrates then asks Plato-Crito to "consider the logical consequences." If Socrates, a victim feeling injured, escapes from prison, his defiance of the Laws of Athens is going to injure them, and this will be contrary to his principle and to his agreement, made when he first accepted their benefits (like his education) and confirmed when he lived contentedly in the city up to his seventieth year. 

Then the crunch.  Socrates believes he should hold to this agreement, and, a victim not of laws but of men, accept death.   Plato-Crito, seeing he's bound by the argument, agrees.  Our eyes are on Smith-Crito.  Is he going to accept the logical consequences and agree with Socrates?  If he doesn't he's unfit for the circle.  Nobody will trust him.

If, on the other hand, he accepts and agrees, might they trust him?  We can't say, but Smith, in a statement following her description of the natural inclinations that assure us of student rationality, gives us a clue.  She's explaining relativism, the philosophy that justifies her replacement of norms, standards, and other "external" (objective) forces with internal (subjective) forces:

At the most general theoretical level the relativism exhibited by this study is not a "position," not a "conviction," and not a set of "claims" about how certain things — reality, truth, meaning, reason, value, and so forth — really are.  It is, rather, a general conceptual style or taste....

In our time that is what Smith's opponents have to concede to her in philosophical debate, a conceptual style (with a concomitant irrelevance of logic) and in ancient Athens that is what Socrates' friends will have to trust in the newcomer, a taste.

With this, Smith-Crito (or, in light of the note, Fish-Crito) is revealed to us as a Euthyphro, the fellow who, when Socrates asks him to state his beliefs in a way that lets them be analyzed and connected, says, "If that's how you want your answer, Socrates, that's how I will give it."  Some people want beliefs stated one way, some want them another way.  The company he has wandered into seems to have a taste for logic.  Taste, style, who knows what the next one will be?  Well, go with the community you're in.  It's all relative. 

Smith-Crito's unfitness will be revealed to the company as Euthyphro's unfitness first by his confident assertions and then by his reluctance to test them.  Something internal has shown Euthyphro exactly what piety is so there's no need for him to examine it seriously, though he is willing to play a game.  When Socrates goes on too long with his questioning he tires of the game and thinks he hears his mother calling ("I just remembered I have appointment somewhere") and so leaves the field.

And I will be going on too long if I lay out all that is obvious here.   If Smith-Crito's behavioral tendencies and recurring inclinations have him taking the same steps logic demands the number of times we assumed he would be taking them he is going to be the Eighth Wonder of the Ancient World.  In a realistic thought experiment he is at some point going to light up the chamber with an absurdity, and we are going to laugh ourselves out of the laboratory.  That's the way it is with naturals.

But in the real world it's going to be sad.  Bring this fellow into that Milton class, give him the freedom Stanley Fish gives him, and how is he going to use it?  He sees a Christ that doesn't fit the picture he has loved, and made the center of his life, the mild, loving Jesus.  He is uncomfortable with a God whose offended majesty won't be satisfied until he gets a blood sacrifice.  And, unless it comes naturally, he can't sharpen his words to state his problem, order them to clarify it, multiply them to refine it, take some steps to solve it, cooperate with others in testing those steps, and, if they're solid, go on to the next ones.  In other words, he's unfit for systemic examination.  Genuine care with belief.

Smith-Euthyphro shows us how our promising friendship with Stanley Fish (and any other postmodern theorists who replace objective norms and standards with something internal) has to end: with a complete break.  His friend can't be our friend.  To us the life he lives is not worth living.

Note: To gauge the extent to which Smith speaks for Fish you might turn to Fish's remarks about her at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ruHdZfrSfg_

I take their affinity to be close enough to make Smith-Euthyphro into Fish-Euthyphro in every appearance above.

219. The Contest Between Paintings and Wallpaper.

 

At each meal in my retirement home I face a wall that has a painting of wallpaper on it.  That's all that's in the frame.  Just a section of wallpaper.

Though it doesn't throw me into transports it does transport me: back to that train station (Post #2) where I immediately thought better of what some people were doing in a passageway when my companion told me that it was "performance art."

You can see what makes the connection between the station and the wall wall: a thing we look at is given added value through a name.  My companion said, "This is art," and so, I think, does the frame.

I argued that a painting shouldn't be given this added value.  It should earn it.  By competing fair and square with everything else offering value.  The performers in the train station are up against anything else you might see in a train station.  The stuff inside a frame is competing against anything you might see outside the frame.  Like the wallpaper.

Now what everything on the wall of a dining room is competing for is the privilege of supplying a background pleasure.  Conversation and food are the foreground pleasures.  You can find all kinds of weighty, paired terms for this division —intrinsic vs. extrinsic, essential vs. accidental, central vs. marginal — but none of them will let you reverse the privilege of the conversation and food.  They (a jazz club will tell it to you) are the trumpet and clarinet, carrying the tune; the wallpaper is just brushes on the drum.

Experience with various pleasures soon taught me, as Socrates taught me later, that for the good life pleasures have to be ranked, and proportioned, and located, foreground or background.  If you disagree I'll take you to a jazz club. 

OK, this retirement home is no jazz club, but the truth I landed on was a general one, applying everywhere.  So here I am, listening closely to my companions (don't think octogenarians aren't worth listening to), and what do I hear?  What has this painter done?  Cued the drummer to take over.  With his brush!  "Quiet, you diners, I'm showing you some art," says the frame.  I look inside.  "Ta da!"  A section of wallpaper.  Outside is inside, background is foreground, lesser is greater, and the effect on me is distraction.  I can no longer keep my mind on the conversation.

So what am I, in a comedy club?  "Hey, the wallpaper guy is here.  Thinks he can use it to test the value of painting." All right, smart-ass, test this.

I know, I'm so vain I think that song is about me, but still I can be useful. How familiar are you with the recent, and in some ways ongoing, culture wars?  Do you know that one side believed in proportion and the other side thought they believed too strongly in it?  The proportionists (also identified as traditionalists, and sometimes classicists) carefully distinguished essential from accidental, intrinsic from extrinsic, central from peripheral — and ranked the former ahead of the latter.  The anti-proportionists (identified as postmodernists) exercised less care and said, in effect, to hell with such ranking.  What traditionalists put in the center they — often playfully, just for a tweak — would put in the margin.

There you've got the retirement home dining room, foreseen by the postmodern painter.  She raises her decentering weapon, her brush, the wallpaper goes into the frame, and pow, there I am with my fork in the air.

Now I've taken enough of these shots (oh those 60s absurdists) to know that the worst thing I can do is go weighty on her.  The purpose, as with those ribbers Hemingway despised, is to get a rise out of you.  Not this time, baby.  I'll play it cool.

How do I do that?  By listening closely to the octogenarian trying to complete her promising thought.  I'll show the painter that, even though I'm internally enjoying her game, it ranks below the game we at the table are still trying to play, however well, the game of understanding life, and what's essentially good in it.  Through talk.  That's Socratic, that's classical, that's Western.  And that's what the postmodernist is turning away from — or having fun with.

104. The Stuff about the Stuff about the Stuff

 

Did your English teacher ever tell you what hermeneutics was? Mine did. "Hermeneutics," he said, "is the stuff about the stuff about the stuff." The stuff was the literature we studied every day. The stuff about the stuff was the criticism we studied once in a while. The stuff about the stuff about the stuff was the theory of criticism (dictionary: "the science and methodology of interpretation") we never got around to studying. Poems and stories took up too much time.

I see the move from poems to the theory of the criticism of poems as a move from this world, the world I lived in, to the academic world, a world then beyond me. My professor took us to it reluctantly, I now believe, because he was also a novelist, and probably wanted us to be good readers of the kind of thing he put a great deal of effort into — though he did write criticism, and put a lot of effort into that too. I see him working, professionally, in the academic world but living, imaginatively, in this world. The stuff he dealt with as a novelist, the Ur-Stuff, was life.

And that's what I had to deal with too when I read his novels. I understood them by filling his words with the meaning my experience with life had given me. When a character didn't want his neighbors to think he was "getting uppity," and so concealed the fact that he was "going to the toilet in the house," I well understood because I had lived in a town where you couldn't "get uppity." When I failed to understand his words the reason was usually lack of experience. When a character said, "Goodbye, Lois, and I forgive you for everything I did to you," I had to wait until I had known some men who mistreated women, and even then fell short.

In any case I was close to life, a lot closer than I was when I started doing graduate work, and discovered, in the abstract distance, all that the word "hermeneutics" referred to.  Reference was not a problem for those I had left behind, the ones close to life in the novelist's class.  There the word referred simply to the higher stuffiness.

Then came the really high hermeneutics in Literary Theory. "That stuff you're so interested in, that stuff all this other stuff is about? There isn't any. There are only representations of stuff, interpretations of stuff."  That's what it told us.

Talk about a kick in the kidneys. "There is nothing outside the text." Zero, zilch. "Words appeal not to facts but to other words." Two boots from Jacques Derrida. Half the people in the English department were doubled over with pain.

Ah, but nobody in a Physics Department was. Over there they ignored Derrida or made fun of him. Like making him the pilot of an airplane approaching an airport. "I've got some stuff in front of me," he tells the tower. "That stuff is a thunderstorm," says the controller. "Steer left." Does Derrida believe there is something outside the controller's text, something "fact" is the right word for? If he doesn't he's not long for this world.

     

Well that's not the world he and his followers live in, according to Harold Bloom. They live in the academic world, where they have to get ahead. Literary Theory, as seen in Cultural Studies at least, is just "a vehicle of careerism."

Sure, when you get serious you'll find that there's a lot more to it than that. But you can't do that, you can't go into this problem, without venturing into an even higher hermeneutics. Who has any energy left?

97. Meet My Philosopher, the Smothers Brother.

J. L. Austin, the Oxford linguistic philosopher, said that we could call oversimplification the occupational disease of philosophers, "were it not their occupation." If that's fair then it's certainly fair for us followers of philosophers to oversimplify each other's positions as taken, say, at a party. The test is personal convenience. "Does the simplification," you ask, "prepare me sufficiently for the next, possibly more serious, encounter? Can I now move on to the next guest?"

I once found it convenient to classify all new academic acquaintances simply as either a Tom or a Dick, following this exchange in the old Smothers Brothers act:

Dick: Your shirttail's out.

Tom: Why do you hate me?

If I identify a Dick I bone up on British philosophy, if a Tom, French philosophy. In one case I'm ready for empiricists, logicians, and hard scientists; in the other I'm ready for phenomenologists, existentialists, and soft scientists, especially psychologists.

Who will I welcome alongside me? That depends on where I am. If I'm in a neighborhood where they break your knuckles if they catch you with your shirttail out I welcome Dick. If I'm at home unconsciously picking on a playmate I welcome Tom. In operating rooms and cockpits it's always Dick; in psychiatrist's offices and confessionals it's always Tom.

There are times when I will positively love Dick. When rumors are flying, when a mob is forming, when a lynching or a pogrom is imminent oh how great it is to have him appear and ask, "Did the provocative event really happen?" When it's a provocation to war — Tonkin Gulf, weapons of mass destruction — it's even greater. Facts. Caring about facts. At last somebody. I could hug him.

But Tom can be helpful too. When I'm listening to a politician, watching commercials, or reading a government-controlled newspaper, I love to hear his voice, "No, what he's really saying is 'Hate this, love that, trust these.'" Tom shows you what a fool you were to concentrate on the shirttail. Those guys were just using it. You've got to love somebody who can take apart propaganda the way Tom does.

The trouble is, Tom and Dick don't get along. Dick thinks he means what he says. He hates to hear "what you really mean." He delights in pointing out the number of places where Tom's philosophers will find themselves with broken knuckles. Tom delights in showing Dick how helpless his philosophers will be before a poem or a subtle philosophy.

I need Dick more than I need Tom simply because I spend more time making my way through the world than I do reading poetry or philosophy. I'd like to trust Tom but I need to trust Dick — as all the scientists, all the physicians I go to, needed to trust him. I can't live without him.

Tom's philosophers weaken my trust in Dick by showing me that he doesn't deserve to be so positive about the "real" world he thinks he's talking about. That world, they say, is just a humanly represented one, and even the representation Dick is surest of is subject to an "uncertainty principle," or an "incompleteness theorem," or its "relativity."

Dick's own philosophers weaken my trust in him by showing me how imperfect his theoretical foundation is. His empiricism proceeds from unexamined dogma and his given, the stuff he gets from his senses, is, they say, largely a myth.

Why should I let criticism from either side weaken my trust in Dick? I don't need a perfect epistemology. I can make my way through the world very well with the epistemology that stood for a long time before Derrida or Rorty or Kuhn revealed its imperfections, or Einstein, or Gödel, or Heisenberg were available to quote.

The old epistemology is not hard to learn, but it is hard to stick to. You don't always notice mistakes, even if you're willing to call them "mistakes." If you have a friend that notices, though, somebody to tell you when your shirttail is out, it's a lot easier. You just have to trust him, even when he doesn't sound like your friend.

84. Postmodern Disturbance

Richard Butrick, Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, has just sent me a reminder of what most disturbed our declining years at Ohio University. It was the claim that “there are no facts, only interpretation.” Nietzsche made it and postmodern theorists rubbed it in. Jacques Derrida: "Words appeal not to facts but to other words." Michel Foucault: "What we call truth is only the expression of dominant power relations that control the cultural semiotic." E. H. Carr: "History is a hard core of interpretation surrounded by a pulp of disputable facts.”

It was terrible being told at the end of your career that there was "no such thing as truth." What were scientists searching for? What was the use of their method? What the hell were we (and so many commencement speakers) doing sending graduates out into the world to war against falsehood?

I think our disturbance was understandable, as is that of David Solway, the author of the piece Professor Butrick sent me (The Weakness of the West, pajamasmedia.com ). The shaking we felt was down in the foundations. Below the scientific method was the Socratic method, the questioning, the answering, the testing, the making sure. Below that was every step-by-step procedure human beings had struggled to work out. There wasn't one that didn't require confidence in the preceding step, it's "truth." At the bottom, it seemed, was rationality itself. And all was shaking.

However, the tremors were not as great as we thought they were and we were more disturbed than we needed to be. It wasn't the foundation that was shaking, it was the language. Let's say Butrick, Solway, and I are boarding an airplane for San Francisco with the scariest postmodernist of all, Michel Foucault. We all want to get there alive. The pilot tells us to turn our electronic devices off — an "expression of a dominant power relation" if I ever heard one. What is Foucault doing? Turning off his iPad with the rest of us. Why? Because Monday he saw the same NBC program I saw. A team of scientists, after a five-year study, had determined that there is, indeed, some risk of interference with airplane function during take-off and landing. Foucault, in the world that is not just a world of human power relations, doesn't want his chance of living to be any lower than that of the rest of us. He wants the scientific method to work. He pushes the button and certifies it.

Which tells me that Foucault didn't really believe those statements that shook us up. And Derrida didn't believe his. Is Derrida going to hear the pilot's words appealing "not to facts but to other words"? Not in the world where he, like the rest of us, wants to live.

Yet Foucault and Derrida sounded as if they believed those shocking things. They were "serious as a heart attack," somebody said. Well, I think they were serious, but about different things. They were serious about psychology (psychoanalysis) and politics, the things that were being taken most seriously by the people they were addressing at the time, French intellectuals. We were serious about words, the ordinary ones, the ones so often misused by the people we were addressing, students.

Well, they shared so much with their audience, they were held to so little by it, that they got careless with their words. When Foucault said, "Truth is only the expression of dominant power relations" he didn't mean only. He couldn't. He turned off his iPad. But he had a point to make in Paris so…. It was the same, I think, with Derrida.

So, Professor Butrick, let us enjoy our retirement in peace. You and I and Solway and Foucault and Derrida are all really on the same side.

73. Attention to Words as a Response to Relativism

Oh those conversations in the eighties and nineties. You could hear Richard Rorty quoted ("Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences") in half the disciplines in the humanities. In the English Department the appeals were to Jacques Derrida ("There are only differences") and Chaim Perelman ("There are only audiences") — in addition to Rorty. Imply a claim for objective truth and you'd get one of them. Then you're in a troubling philosophical argument — and all you wanted to do, usually, was clear up a few problems in the Interpretation of Poetry course.

Get into trouble often enough and you'll figure out a way to get out. Here's my way. Say you're a scientist. You're accused of believing in the existence of a real world that can be objectively known. You say, "No, I just believe in the existence of a group of people who call each other 'scientists.' I take 'scientist' to be a compliment-word and I want them to apply it to me.

"What do I do to get the compliment? The same things I have been doing to discover objective reality. I examine nature, declare what I have discovered in a journal, and wait for the compliment. If readers of the journal, replicating my examination, get the same results I got I get the compliment. They were persuaded. That's all I'm doing, persuading people. Just as Aristotle's orator did.

"Except that there's a difference in our audiences. Mine isn't persuaded until the needles on their dials are in the same place I reported my needles to be. There's my rhetoric. When I work day and night in my lab I don't say I'm seeking the truth about the world, I say I'm working on a speech, the only kind that will persuade these people."

The scientist has something quieting to say, then, to each relativist. To Rorty: "With 'scientist' I merely take your compliment a step further, from sentence to sentence-maker." To Derrida: "I too deal only in difference; here it's the difference between language that gets me the compliment and language that doesn't." To Perelman: "I never go beyond the needs of my audience."

That's a scientist's response but it's not so different from mine. In my poetry class my audience needs reports on how English speakers form sentences and give meanings to words. Those reports they get from me, drawing on grammar book and dictionary. Without them they, with relatively little experience in the reading of English, can't construe sentences, the first operation in the reading of a poem.

It's to satisfy this need that I try to keep relativists quiet. Half my work is the work of a scientist, providing reports which, if believed, will allow my audience to proceed to the really rewarding part of their work, letting their imaginations go where the poet points them. In the first half of the job relativistic statements of the type we heard in the last century, are inadmissible. They are admissible in the second half, where differences in what's imagined are all the fun.

Keeping the two straight is one of the hardest jobs in the English classroom, if not in all of the humanities. You can convince beginning students — natural, self-protecting subjectivists — that scientific standards govern part of poetry-reading but it takes a lot of class time. Quarters are too short, life is too short, to allow relativists to lengthen it.

3. Did We Dismiss "Deconstruct" Too Quickly?

"Deconstruct MAD," said Timothy Egan (NYT Online, July 14, 2010) about the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction. And he went on to show just what should be done. That may not worry most readers but it should worry a lot of English-speaking philosophers and their followers, like me. Egan is using "deconstruct" in a way that looks sensible! That word that we took to be just a Paris fad.

The main complaint was that it was superfluous. We already had "dismantle" and "disassemble" available to tell people to take something apart; all "deconstruct" did was add a little French spice. And there's where Egan snags us. From his pen the word means, "take it apart very carefully, with close attention to what went into its construction, including the intentions of those who constructed it." That's not spice, that's solid referential meaning, and we can't deny it.

Nor, if we attend to history, can we deny the source. Egan got that meaning from the despised Jacques Derrida, who under the name he coined, "deconstruction," carefully took apart Plato's Phaedrus, and gave his followers the model.

Why was Derrida despised? Because, in layman's terms, he was a Fancy Dan. Laughably so. When he analyzed a piece of fiction he would speak deeply of what he called its "double invagination," which meant "the verted reapplication of the outer edge to the inside of a form where the outside opens a pocket [and] comes to extend (or encroach on) the invagination of the lower edge."

If you giggle at that, layman, maybe you can understand why philosophers, after (in their way) giggling at it, and therefore despising, the author, are going to have a hard time giving him credit for a sensible coinage. Which they have to do, after reading Egan. There's no way out of it. He's a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist. And that's the Times he's writing in.

Might it be, though, that Egan is just one swallow, and there will be no summer for Derrida? Let's check the Times for the last twelve months.

Who would have guessed how many things are now being deconstructed. Patterned fabrics, police shootings, dance steps, Lorenz Hart's song lyrics, the first lady's outfit, blackface minstrelsy, sugar-laden breakfast food, the flavors of a salad, and conceptions of space and matter are all being given the treatment. And those are only the more plausible-sounding things. How do you deconstruct mother's milk, photosynthesis, an automobile, the living conditions of a fossil frog, and a Knicks' loss on the basketball court? Our Anglo analytic professors were right. The word's a continental sell.

When we get to "culinary deconstruction" we're sure of it. Those chefs who put the word on their menus (for a traditional dish broken down into its constituent parts) are using it only for its philosophical flavor. That's not serious usage.

But then we find a choreographer carefully breaking down a predecessor's work and criticizing it. That fits and it's serious. And there's nothing funny at all about a proposal to deconstruct a Congressional plan for national health spending. That's just what Egan wanted done with the State Department's policy of mutually assured destruction.

So the evidence is mixed. Maybe the best thing to do is imagine an occasion where we'd be happy to have the word in our vocabulary. How about the drafting of President Bush's State of the Union speech before the invasion of Iraq? "Axis of evil." Egan arrives at the conference and says, "Come on, deconstruct this." Would we like to have somebody there taking apart Bush's speech as carefully as Derrida took apart Plato's Phaedrus? If so we can be glad we hadn't gotten rid of "deconstruction."