Fish Baits

Concerning the Stanley Fish review mentioned in my previous post, which, incidentally, appears to have drawn the attention of folks over at Print Culture, my friend, in an e-mail message to me, make the following observations:

The problem with French theory, I think, is its language, which is an even more recondite Newspeak than that spoken by Enlightenment rationalists, with their zeal for coining words to categorize everything. This incomprehensible discourse became a safe haven for professionalizing academics who were coming under fire for not producing anything pragmatic. The fortress of impenetrable jargon made it plausible for the academics to argue that what they were doing was over their philistine critics' heads.

But deconstruction -- the idea that ideology is constructed and malleable -- has mainly been a boon to advertising, supplying working models for undoing prejudices against, say, wasteful spending or frivolous identity-making. Deconstruction immediately opens the possibility of ongoing, perpetually incomplete (and perpetually profitable) reconstruction. Hence women are always "becoming" women and men, men, etc.

I suppose deconstruction bears responsibility for lending itself to those we'd least like to see brandish its exegetical powers, namely marketers and PR flaks; but, in hindsight, this seems like it was inevitable, even if French theory had never taken off in the US and turned the nation's universities into hermetic cloisters of a new secular priest class. It just too bad that deconstruction can't lead us out of the deadlock it has led us into.

Which is perhaps why I've found myself drawn to Badiou's work. Badiou is a French theorist who's up to something quite different from his cohort. I especially like how he reconceptualizes the Real as simply the void or null set that makes positive sets possible, rather than some all-encompassing yet ineffable roil of force that informs our every word and thought without being expressible in them. Though Badiou's ontology is difficult to summarize succinctly, the upshot, as it applies in ethical and political domains, is that truth needn't be a priori; it can be contingent and a posteriori and remain truth. Badiou offers, I think, the possibility of reconciling the competing agendas of academicians in the humanities. Events in their radical, unforeseen contingency can guide accurate veridical ad hoc discourses of them, if individuals only enter into an honest composition with the event's truth.