Fiction vs History?

[o j m]

A few brief thoughts before I get back to grading this stack of (theory) 
papers in front of me.

Otto, your points are well taken, but I think you're missing a few aspects 
of Ghetta's argument.  First, I do worry that he's right in suggesting that 
perhaps the deconstructive technique can become dogmatic.  You've got to be 
careful not to universalize deconstruction as a "technique."  If you do, 
this is as ideologically blind as what deconstruction aims to 
critique.  Perhaps deconstruction is the first philosophy to fail precisely 
when it begins to succeed--and fails because of the success.  *Ought* 
(there's a word kids in my generation seldom use!) one to always employ 
deconstruction?  Are there better techniques for certain kinds of problems 
and questions?

Second, Ghetta's point about "T"ruth being in the realm of God, wasn't 
playing the God Card.  What he was getting at, I think, is a point I raised 
a while ago: poststructuralists set up a strawman argument against 
knowledge.  By positing that any error or ambiguity preclude knowledge or 
objectivity, poststructuralists set up an account of truth, knowledge, and 
objectivity that is 1) very easy to shoot down, and 2) an account of 
knowledge that very few people, if anybody, within the philosophical 
community would adhere to.  To reiterate a point made all ready: the world 
cannot be reduced to a text.  There are indeed extralingual things, aspects 
of this world that operate with or without our fancy words and 
theories.  The real challenge is to articulate a theory of meaning that 
accounts for error, subjectivity, and imperfect knowledge and yet does not 
abandon ideas such as truth or objectivity, a theory of meaning that can 
indeed draw a conceptual line between fiction and history.

Perhaps a good way to approach this is through the work of Edward 
Said.  While it is indeed the case, as Said argues, nobody is able to 
extract their perspective from a social power construct, this does not mean 
that there can be no such thing as history.  Indeed, what is the point of a 
body of work like Said's--or, in a sense, Foucault's--except to point out a 
wrong line of historical thinking?  Behind such a project is the implicit 
assertion that they have a better notion of history--a version more true, 
somehow.  While it may not be the case that we will ever have a final, 
perfect history book (that is, a history book that moves from the gray area 
into the clearly defined black or white area), I for one adamantly believe 
there can be more and less accurate histories.  Who here would claim that a 
history text that denies the Holocaust is more*right* than Shirer's The 
Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, or that official Soviet records denying 
the gulags is more accurate than The Gulag Archipelago?  Of course a 
historian is selective in choosing what to tell--the question is the 
rightness of those selections, though, is it not?

O.