Snappycrossdresser

[o j m]

At 06:39 AM 10/17/2004 +0200, Otto wrote:
>I'm not writing an essay for PN, this is just a mailing list and the current
>discussion emerged upon some really (unprovoked) nasty remarks of
>pomo-haters on the death of Jacques Derrida.

I didn't mean to attack you specifically.  I apologize if I did.  I was 
pointing out an epistemologically inconsistent claim that many 
poststructuralists make: that their denial of epistemically reliable 
knowledge is itself put forth as epistemically reliable.  So one of two 
things must be true: 1) the insistence on epistemological unreliability 
could very well itself be wrong, or 2) the poststructuralist rejection of 
epistemic reliability itself somehow transcends the logocentric construct, 
somehow avoids its very own critique.  The former seems more amenable to 
poststructuralist criticism, but if it is indeed right the force of the 
argument is lost.

>You're welcomed, no offense taken.
>The theory has been presented here for years now (with lots of examples and
>references, not only by me) but all we get are the same questions over and
>over again, and no other theory.

I am happy to discuss alternatives to poststructuralism.  I also don't want 
to overrun a Pynchon list with posts on Brandom and Davidson, etc.  Would 
it be better to discuss this off-list, or is it all right to open up the 
discussion to the list?

>Reading and interpreting novels requires further reading. I have encountered
>an unwillingness to take the effort of working through some theoretical
>stuff *before* deciding that postmodernism is just hocuspocus. If someone
>can refute Jonathan Culler's reading of Derrida he/she should do so. But
>just the claim that Derrida is illogical and obscure (as Jolly did) doesn't
>make him so.

Of course.  The great majority of those who dismiss 
postmodernism/poststructuralism have read little if any of it.  But perhaps 
refutation is the wrong way to think about this.  Although I think you 
could refute certain aspects of poststructuralism, I think a rejection of 
poststructuralism in toto is naive.  I think there are better, more 
coherent philosophical and literary perspectives than 
poststructuralism.  Thinking something is better doesn't necessitate a 
refutation--simply evidence that the other theory more successfully 
accounts for the world and the text.

>I guess because all so-called reliable epistemologies of the past have
>turned out to be logocentric constructs and, on the basis of deconstruction
>in the end can be proven to be more or less nuts.

All of them?  I am worried by this totalizing view.  Be careful that 
poststructuralism doesn't become Doctrine or dogma.  I believe there are 
certain contemporary epistemologies that defy such a characterization: 
reliablism, coherentism, causal theories of knowledge, etc.  In fact, some 
of these have a great deal in common with deconstruction.  Analytic 
philosophy also went through an epistemological crisis mid 20th 
century.  Wilfrid Sellars's _Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind_, W.V.O. 
Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," and Wittgenstein's _Philosophical 
Investigations_ more or less did away with traditional empiricist 
epistemologies in the same way Derrida did (though Derrida was a good 10 
years later).  Sellars, perhaps most powerfully, refused the innocent 
relation between sense experience and knowledge.  Language always gets in 
the way of pure experience: "all awareness of sorts, resemblances, facts, 
etc., in short, all awareness of abstract entities--indeed, all awareness 
even of particulars--is a linguistic affair" (Sellars, EPM p. 63).  But 
whereas poststructuralists took their attack on epistemology as definitive, 
many pragmatists and analytic philosophers refined and rethought their 
theories of knowledge.

>I disagree that they refused to provide arguments. Those masses of books
>haven't been written for nothing. To me it seems more a failure of study.

Fair enough.  I'm not a poststructuralist and haven't read as deeply in the 
field as I'm sure many of you have.  I will refrain from listing my 
qualifications (or my GRE scores...), but will say that I have read deeply 
enough to have a good grasp of a wide variety of poststructural thought, 
from Derrida to Althusser to Michael Warner.  I also encourage some study 
on your behalf before you conclude that all epistemologies have turned out 
to be logicentric constructs.  (And if you've ever been around an American 
English department with young faculty scrambling for tenure, you might have 
a different perspective on all that mass of books, which indeed were 
written for a distinct professional or political purpose....)

best,
O.