what's new about deconstruction?

[Terri]

Doug Millison wrote:
> 
> "In the most recent sections of the book Fish seems to have realised that to
> argue for a single, authorial interpretation is now deeply unfashionable,
> and his account undergoes drastic revision. Milton, he now tells us, was
> actually a "postmodern", who believed all truth local and revisable. Critics
> who have detected conflict and ambiguity in Paradise Lost were quite right
> after all. The poem's official morality, created by one part of Milton's
> brain,"stigmatises and resists the energies, also created by the poet and
> expressive of something in him, that would escape it". These are welcome
> concessions, and make much of Fish's work on Milton redundant. But they do
> not get beyond what Blake said two centuries ago."

That was, that Blake, like Pynchon, when he created
Satan/Blicero was of 
the Devil's part w/o knowing it. ;-)

A philosophical movement and theory
of literary criticism that questions traditional assumptions
about certainty, identity, and truth, asserts that words can
only refer to other words, and attempts to demonstrate how
statements about any text subvert their own meanings: “In
deconstruction, the critic claims there is no meaning to be
found in the actual text, but only in the various, often
mutually irreconcilable, ‘virtual texts’ constructed by
readers in their search for meaning” (Rebecca Goldstein).


AHD

Deconstruction, as defined above is a concept. It is a
concept used in critical theory.
It is a strategy.   It is a strategy applied to writing
generally, and to literature in particular, whereby systems
of thought and concepts are dismantled in such a way as to
expose the divisions that lie at the very heart of meaning
itself. If interpretation is a process designed to reduce a
text to some kind of "order,"  Deconstruction seeks to
undermine the basis upon which that order rests.
Deconstruction challenges the notion that all forms of
mental and linguistic activity are generated from within an
autonomous "center,"  advancing the more disturbing
proposition that such centers are themselves to be grasped
textually only as rhetorical constructions.  

It is also defined as a philosophical movement and it  has a
long
philosophical pedigree, and although it is often associated
with a bunch philosophers (usually Derrida is the first bead
on the string that includes Lyotard, Baudrillard &c.), this
threading bias fails to account for the rich diversity of
styles and schools that form contemporary philosophical
culture. However, this is the case with any school or style
let alone the latest, the BIG, the Terms, like Modern,
Gnostic, Dialectic, "religious writer" and so forth....

Again,  I ask you Dear Reader to search Nietzsche's text,
Beyond Good and
Evil, the String or Thread in my Dear Writer's Head, here it
is trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York Vintage Books, 1966),
par. 20, p. 27. 

"That individual philosophical concepts are not anything
capricious or autonomously evolving, but grow up in
connection and relationship with each other: that however
suddenly and arbitrarily they appear in the history of
thought, they nevertheless belong to a system as all the
members of the fauna of a continent--is betrayed by the fact
that the most diverse philosophers keep filling in a
definite scheme of possible philosophies...."

What has all this to do with TRP being a religious writer
and the American Novel, I
mean, the church key and beer,  I haven't the big dust cloud
over the American night of a chance of guessing at, but.... 

as we rode in the bus in the weird phosphorescent void of
the Lincoln Tunnel we leaned on each other with fingers
waving and yelled and talked excidedly...He was simply a
youth tremendously excited with life...because he wanted so
much to live...And a kind of holy lightening I saw flashing
from his excitement and his visions, which he described so
torrentially that people in buses looked around to see the
"overexcited nut." 

                        JK, On The Road


PS a "neo pragmatist" is a sophist as far as I can tell. 
Pragmatism, the American Brand, is rooted in Aristotle not
the Sophists, but 
the neo-pragmatists have nothing in common with Aristotle or
Dewey or McKeon or teh Classical American school, Peirce,
James, Santayana, Royce, but the neo have much in common
with Derrida.