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Dealing With Derrida, by Michael H. Ducey, Ph.D. (Continued)
The End of Structuralism One structuralist of the sixties lived long enough to recognize its limitations in the late seventies. Tzvetan Todorov (b. 1939) arrived in Paris from Bulgaria in 1963. In the sixties he was an orthodox structural formalist, but in the late seventies became a strong advocate of the "subject" semiology of Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) as opposed to the "object" semiology of Saussure. Bakhtin never left Russia and his work was unknown in France until after his death. In taking up Bakhtin's work, Todorov repeated his description of how reading Dostoevsky implicated and transformed the reader, thus restoring the complexity and the reality of the living subject to the study of language. For Todorov, the reader-author dialogue became the maker of meaning; literature and ideological study became much more than simply decoding internal textual coherence. Todorov attributes his change of perspective to the fact in the sixties his fascination with formalism was basically a rejection of what was going on in his native Bulgaria, where literary history was purely event-oriented and completely external to texts. … In addition, given the implacable ideological dogmatism of Stalinism…Todorov had wanted to free himself by taking refuge within the text itself, its grammatical categories, and its rhythm, and to keep as far as possible from the leaden ideology that was suffocating literary studies. (M. Bakhtin, the Dialogic Principle, 1981) [Dosse, II, 324-235.] When he came to France and experienced a more democratic political milieu, his need to escape from the outside world in the structures of the text diminished, and he started to reflect on the subject and meaning. The work of Bakhtin was a guide for him. In Todorov we see the "escapist" premise of structuralism brought to the surface, and although his escapism has specific reference to Stalinist dogmatism in Bulgaria in the sixties, general structuralism also had an escapist agenda, although it was more complicated, as we shall see. Todorov's publication of M. Bakhtin, the Dialogic Principle only took place in 1981, but the end of structuralism started long before that. On the morning of May 10,1968, Paris awoke to barricades in the streets, and ten million workers all over France on strike. Since many of the central actors were students, they were well aware of the dominance of structuralism in the university, and they were not happy with it. Structuralism's failure to be in touch with reality was readily apparent. One of the key slogans of the student part of the May 1968 crisis was, "It is clear that structures don't take to the streets." The failure of the leading intellectuals of the time to have any clue that the protests of 1968 were about to take place was convincing evidence that they were out of touch with reality. The list of professors whose lectures the students disrupted included some really famous names: Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes. Lévi-Strauss was dismayed by events and left town entirely. The chickens of Foucault's celebration of having arrived at "an age that is perhaps one of pure thinking" had suddenly come home to roost. François Dosse claims that Structuralism "was contestatory and corresponded to a particular moment in Western history." [I, xx.] The rebellious "counter-cultural" dynamic had an intellectual component in France that it did not have in the United States. A central issue in Paris was authoritarianism in the universities. What was an intellectual movement in Paris was a more general cultural movement in the United States, as the hippies and "the Woodstock generation" protested what they saw as political and social authoritarianism in America. In both cases the Vietnam war was an important manifestation of the defectiveness of the old world-view. So in Paris there was "a specific political moment characterized by disenchantment and a particular configuration of knowledge requiring a revolution to successfully carry through a reform…" [Dosse, I, xx.] For these intellectuals, ontologizing structure in the name of Science and Theory became an alternative to traditional Western intellectual models. Derrida and Husserl Throughout the structuralist period there was a basic disagreement between structuralists on the one hand and existentialists and phenomenologists on the other. Jean Paul Sartre for existentialism and Paul Ricoeur and Maurice Merleau-Ponty for phenomenology were among the notable dissenters from the structuralist worldview. The work of Edmund Husserl (who had died in 1938) was a key defense of the primordial connection between knowledge and reality, and so Derrida's "deconstruction" of Husserl was a key defense of the structuralist separation of knowledge and reality. So, in reviewing Derrida's deconstruction of Husserl, we have to keep in mind the background fact that the underlying issue is not necessarily Husserl, but the primordial connection itself between knowledge and reality. Husserl might have defended the connection badly, and Derrida's deconstruction of him might have been valid. But since he was deconstructing a bad defense, his argument does not touch the background question. This is case no. 1: that Husserl was wrong, and Derrida was right about Husserl but wrong about reality. A second possibility is that Husserl's defense was valid and Derrida's deconstruction was invalid. This is case no. 2: that Husserl was right and Derrida was wrong, simply. A third possibility is that Husserl's defense was somewhat faulty and Derrida's attack was completely wrong. This is case no. 3: that Husserl was wrong, and Derrida was more wrong. I like case no. 3, but in any case, we end with the position that knowledge is primordially connected with reality. And so any exercise of reasoning that ends with the position that it is not has to be faulty in its essence. As a preliminary note on Derrida's reading of Husserl, I offer the comment of some one who has spent much more time on Derrida than I have:
So, there is a literature on problems with Derrida's basic arguments. However, in his dealing with Husserl, Derrida starts at a point that everybody agrees on, that phenomenology starts with a "principle of principles" that "primordial presence to intuition is the source of sense and evidence, the a priori of a prioris." He adds:
However, Husserl's choice of the words "present" and "presence" to indicate the ground of all knowledge has some very unfortunate consequences. That choice sets up a confusion between two completely different meanings of the word "presence." One meaning is "phenomenological presence". This refers to the immediate access to being in the original act of knowledge. It does not refer to time at all. So, phenomenological presence might be better expressed by calling it presence-to-being. That would save it from being confused with the other meaning of "presence", what we should call "temporal presence", that is, the occurrence of an event at a particular moment in time. Derrida also mentions in this passage in Speech and Phenomena that this living presence is "the now". This reinforces the confusion between presence-to-being and occurrence-at-a-particular-moment-in-time. It is also unfortunate that Derrida has to use the word "form" in the phrase "the universal form of all experience". What he wants to refer to is the "universal basis of all experience", which is not a form. It is an act. But this word-slippage is also quite telling, and one of the many clues in Derrida's work that he is confusing the order of abstract concepts and the order of actual reality. The confusion between presence-to-being and occurrence-at-a-particular-moment-in-time would also be avoided if we used the word "insight" in the above comment. That would leave us with a text that reads something like this:
But the confusion between presence-to-being and occurrence-at-a-particular-moment-in-time is thoroughgoing in the conversation between Derrida and Husserl. It is ever-present.
"Now" here has to be a substitute term for the phenomenological present---presence-to-being--and as such it further indicates that Derrida cannot distinguish between the presence-to-being of insight and the occurrence-at-a-particular-moment-in-time of insight. The word "now" can only properly mean occurrence-at-a-particular-moment-in-time, and so if you use it to mean presence-to-being, that distorts language intolerably. If you understand that insight is an act, then you understand that when one insight "purely and simply succeeds another insight in objective time", it quite unproblematically has the same presence-to-being that the previous act had (that distortedly so-called "past Now as such" ). But the language is inherently confusing, because apparently, both Husserl and Derrida were inherently confused about the relation of knowledge to being on the one hand and to time on the other. So, both of them had to be out of their bodies when they were thinking about these matters. That is the only way you can confuse concept and act. Therefore, in order to decipher that conversation one has to continually step back and remind oneself about the background question--the connection between knowledge and reality--and recognize that the language of both Husserl and Derrida is, in its essence, irreducibly confused. This stepping back is particularly necessary for interpreting the following passage:
What is he saying here? Is he concerned about tying these two moments--"representation" and "appresentation"--to each other? Or is he concerned about tying both of them to "real presence" itself? The thrust of his argument seems clearly to be--in general and from the lines at the end of the paragraph--that he wants to end up with the a priori bifurcation of "real presence" in itself. But it seems clear that the "irreducible non-presence" that Derrida thinks he has detected here is merely a temporal non-presence. But temporal non-presence in no way means phenomenological non-presence, because phenomenological presence occurs in an act that by its very nature--by our very nature as human, as embodied spirit--occurs over and over again without losing its simplicity and immediacy each time. So, if we remove the troublesome terms of "present" and "presence" in this comment and substitute the term "insight", then we discover that yes indeed there are certain connections in the first stages of knowing that need to be explained, but these connections ("transitions") occur in time, and recurrence in time has no effect on the unity and simplicity of the act of insight. It can, and does, occur over and over again. In the first case, there is no "transition" at all required to get from insight to "representation" because the act of insight produces the innately representable. It is primordially an empty form. It only needs a material decision about sounds or marks. In reviewing the validity of any piece of knowledge, the knower does not ultimately refer to dictionaries, he or she ultimately refers to the original act of insight. The question of the validity of knowledge is always the question, "Do I really know that?" and the answer to that question is ultimately recall, and repetition, of the act of insight. The second case is even less in need of a "transition". Intersubjectivity is made possible by the fact that there are other carbon-based life-forms that have the selfsame simple experience of insight. Their experiences are "identical" to yours. You can establish the fact of this by engaging in eye contact and uttering a grunt. It is intriguing to try to fantasize how homo sapiens first handled the conversation about conversation. But in present-day life we still run into inaccessible symbolizations that are covered by a "you know" or an "uh huh", primitive allusions to the shared experience of unformed understanding. Furthermore, getting it that insight does not need a "transition" to "arrive at" representation or conversation requires you to be thoroughly embodied. If you are in your body, the occurrence of insight is readily verified, and the multiple recurrence of immediate presence-to-being is also easily accounted for. But if you should be so fascinated by your process of thinking--which is an out-of-body experience--that you start confusing your abstract ideas about the act of insight with its actual occurrence, then you run into problems. The thoroughgoing confusion between presence-to-being and occurrence-at-a-particular-moment-in-time shows up in Husserl's The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness, which is the subject of Chapter 5 of Speech and Phenomena, and Derrida expands and compounds this confusion there. He finally makes the argument that past and future (memory and expectation, retention and protention) enter "the zone of primordiality". That is, they as it were "invade" this zone and "corrupt" it, i.e., radically destroy any possibility of a simple self-identity. This confusion renders the whole conversation between Derrida and Husserl completely useless for throwing light on the background question: the primordial connection itself between knowledge and reality. (In the following passage I will use the abbreviation "p" for "phenomenological" and "t" for "temporal".)
For Derrida, Husserl's confusion is centrally useful for him to arrive at the crowning conclusion, the foundation of all his philosophy, namely that this relation of the now to non-presence "radically destroys any possibility of a simple self-identity." [SP, 66.] But both Husserl and Derrida are wrong on this point. To say that "there is a duration to the blink; it closes the eye." Is to mix up the two kinds of presence. The "blink"---that is, the immediate presence to being---always remains "a blink" even if it has duration, because what it is immediately present to is being, which is not in time. Watching the whole football game does not close my eye. It is an extended blink that results in the affirmation that for the whole duration of its sixty minutes, the football game is. |
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