Every sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written (in the usual sense of this opposition), as a small or large unity, can be cited, put between quotation marks; thereby it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts in an absolutely nonsaturable fashion. This does not suppose that the mark is valid outside its context, but on the contrary that there are only contexts without any center of absolute anchoring. This citationality, duplication, or duplicity, this iterability of the mark is not an accident or anomaly, but is that (normal/abnormal) without which a mark could no longer even have a so-called “normal” functioning. What would a mark be that one could not cite? And whose origin could not be lost on the way?
JACQUES DERRIDA
If you are scratching your head on that quotation, give your scalp a break. It is utterly meaningless. This is the language of an architect of deconstruction. Not only do these words make no sense whatsoever, the deconstructionists would agree with you. For them, language is inherently meaningless. Then, they argue for their point with meaningless language.
Deconstruction is a philosophy of language that says that words cannot convey meaning. Pseudo-intellectuals deep into these theories will recoil at my gross oversimplification of their position and claim that I have built a straw man of their sham philosophy. Yet, they will be unable to refute what I have written because this would require words. When they do use words, these words are so abstruse as to be meaningless. This leaves you, Gentle Reader, to choose between my meaningful words and their meaningless words. This is an argument that I cannot lose.
My introduction to deconstruction came as a clueless undergraduate student when I enrolled in a class about theory as an English major. I can't remember if the class was required or not. I just wish I had never taken the class as it was the only English course I have ever taken where I got a C. I was grateful for that C because it is the only course in my entire life where I learned absolutely nothing. But it was providential that I took the class because I would spend the next decade coming to understand why I did not understand it. It also allayed any concerns about forfeiting a possible career as a professor of English. With garbage classes like this one, I never stood a chance.
This class was taught by a cultural Marxist sodomite who rode to class on a ten speed bike covered in Clinton-Gore campaign stickers. Nothing about him told me that he was a homosexual pervert, but I got the vibe. Recently, I looked him up online and confirmed that he was a sodomite as he had pictures of him and his lover.
I will refrain from posting his name. But he did seem to be a nice and agreeable fellow despite the damage he must have inflicted on the rectal vault of hisboyfriend. He even writes poetry about such violations and crimes against nature. But I digress.
This fellow did not teach the class so much as assign readings for the students. We would return to class utterly clueless about what we had read because they made no sense whatsoever. We hoped he would clear up the confusion, but he never did. He would just ask what we thought about the readings. Then, we wrote papers where we used what we had "learned" to analyze various texts. These could be poems or even song lyrics. I was into U2 at the time, so I wrote about songs the band had written. None of what I wrote made any sense because I was just making it up. This sodomite never noticed that I was writing garbage. The entire class was writing garbage.
Things sort of came to a head when the prof expressed a bit of exasperation about the papers we were writing. He told us that even though our readings were hard to understand and were completely inscrutable that our papers needed to be clear as a bell and understandable. At that moment, the penumbra of bullsh*t had burst for me and for everyone else. It must have also burst for the professor because he would leave the world of English lit and get advanced degrees and a new career in computer science where you actually have to do things that are rational and make sense.
Fortunately for me, all of my other English classes made complete sense, and I would get A's in those classes. Those professors were old and were taught in a time when language actually conveyed meaning. One of my professors taught me a valuable lesson about literature. Great literature was a source of moral education. As Russell Kirk put it,
Real literature is something much better than a harmless instrument for getting through idle hours. The purpose of great literature is to help us to develop into full human beings.Most people don't learn morality in philosophy classes. They learn morality from the stories and poetry they encounter throughout all of their lives. Whether it is Aesop's fables, Shakespeare, Star Wars, or the Bible, we learn about the way we should live from those great tales and lines. Great literature is a tool for God to teach us something about the world, divinity, and ourselves.
It was not enough for the nihilists to produce bad literature of which there is a great abundance. They also had to corrupt the good literature by first stripping the morality from those lines and tales and making them say something quite different. This is how you get Hamlet turning from a man torn by a moral dilemma about avenging his dead father into a son who desperately wants to have sex with his mother. I bet that turn of plot would be a real surprise to William Shakespeare.
This perversion of literature is made possible in much the same way that the perversion of the sexual function has been made possible. With sex, objective morality was overthrown in favor of subjective morality which is really no morality at all. Likewise, with literature, objective meaning of the text was overthrown in favor of subjective meaning which is really no meaning at all. Words don't convey any meaning, so you are free to make those words say what you wish. For some reason, those meanings always revolve around sodomy, incest, feminazism, and the overthrow of capitalism in favor of socialism.
To make this madness possible, there needed to be a philosophy undergirding it and providing an "intelligent" rationale for this absurdity. So, the world of literary scholarship turned to philosophy and a set of philosophers who comprise a school known as deconstruction. These architects and proto-architects made it possible for fools to reject the reality of a text and substitute their own reality. Somewhere, philosophy turned from the love of wisdom to the love of foolishness.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The first proto-architect of deconstruction was Friedrich Nietzsche who wrote the obituary for the Almighty by declaring that God was dead. Without the objective sense and morality that God gave, the individual was forced to rebuild his worldview on new subjective foundations. This gave the individual unfettered freedom and license. Existentialists like Camus and Sartre would reckon with this unfettered freedom. The individual can either build from scratch or he can reimagine and repurpose old myths for new purposes. As Nietzsche put it,
Anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose.The individual is free to make new use of the old things he has been given in much the same way that a sodomite makes new use of his partner's orifices intended for other functions. Or, he can destroy his biological plumbing and transgender into a mutilated male and declare himself a woman. If all this is possible, then it is possible that Huckleberry Finn and Jim had a sodomiti relationship out there on that raft. It all becomes possible when that raft is no longer moored to any fixed object or worldview.
There are many ideas floating around in Nietzsche's writings, and they can be quite complex. But they are understandable with a bit of reading and study. Nietzsche is not easy reading, but his ideas are comprehensible. One of those ideas has to do with the Apollonian and the Dionysian from The Birth of Tragedy.
Nietzsche wrote and published Tragedy at the beginning of his career. It was an immediate failure and would cost him his career as a philology professor. The reason for this is because Nietzsche went against the grain of scholarship at that time as he gave a new interpretation to old forms. The Greeks were not writing plays about morality and the gods so much as writing about living heroically in the face of the abyss of nihilism. Professors in the Judeo-Christian tradition immediately got a whiff of the stench emanating from this work and rejected it. But it had made its mark.
The essence of the work is between the concepts of the Apollonian and the Dionysian. The Apollonian represented order and reason. The Dionysian represented ecstasy and chaos. The Greeks would weld this order and chaos into their art forms. By extension, the composer Richard Wagner achieved much the same thing in his music. Wagner was a contemporary of Nietzsche, but the relationship between them would not last. Nietzsche probably appeared to Wagner as more of a deranged fan than a philosopher.
The contributions Nietzsche made to the school of deconstruction was nihilism and the permission to reinterpret classical forms in new and deranged ways. This is how you get today's communist, feminist, and LGBTQ interpretations of Shakespeare and Chaucer despite the fact that neither man had any clue about these modern ideologies. It no longer matters that the writers of the past wrote for a time and a place and had their own ideas about the world. This literary historical method of interpretation is old hat. These interpretations derived from deconstruction would also spill over into things like constitutional law, music, and the law. Even this essay that I am writing can be reinterpreted by these idiots to say something completely different from what I have actually written.
Jacques Lacan
The next proto-architect in our journey to madness is the French psychotherapist Jacques Lacan. Lacan lived and worked during the early twentieth century and had a lot of theories building on what Freud had taught. The most prominent of these theories involves the mirror stage of human development. You don't have to bother reading this man because he said and wrote nothing of substance. And if he did, you couldn't understand a word of what he was writing or saying anyway. This inscrutability did not hamper him in the least but helped make a sort of intellectual celebrity out of this mumbling fool.
You may feel that I am being unkind to Lacan, so to make my case, I will let the man make the case for himself. Here is Lacan on whatever:
Spend some time pondering that deep thought. If you find that one easy, here is one more challenging:I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think. I am not whenever I am the plaything of my thought; I think of what I am where I do not think to think.
I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object. What is realised in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming.I think the only process of becoming here is the process of becoming bullsh*t. But my mockery of this man's thinking and writing would be incomplete without a third ridiculous example. Here it is:
Reading in no way obliges us to understand.Wow. I actually understand that one. Somehow, Lacan accidentally wrote the truth there. We are not obliged to understand what we are reading which is a relief because I don't understand a word of anything this man wrote. I don't think the man even understood what he wrote himself. Like the tailors of the emperor's new clothes, this man weaved a garment of pure crap and dared the world to call him out on it. Apparently, no one did. They embraced him as a genius which had become somebody who said things you couldn't understand. Because you couldn't understand it, it must be profound. Nevermind the smell of crap attached to it.
Jacques Derrida
We now arrive at the chief architect of deconstruction--Jacques Derrida. Derrida lived from 1930 to 2004 and destroyed Western civilization in his lifetime. That may be a bit of an overstatement, but he did introduce the poison into the waters of today's intellectual establishment that makes whatever pours forth from their fountains unfit to drink.
Derrida's aim was to tear down the edifice of Western civilization, so he was the one who called his philosophy "deconstruction." Derrida belongs to the school known as "post-structuralist" which David Foster Wallace described this way,
"deconstructionist" and "poststructuralist" mean the same thing, by the way: "poststructuralist" is what you call a deconstructionist who doesn't want to be called a deconstructionist.
I give Wallace credit for his refreshing candor on this matter. What is the difference between a structuralist and a poststructuralist? I honestly couldn't tell you because they both strike me as madness and gibberish. But apparently this academic fight between two maniacs in the insane asylum were a big deal. But if I had to venture a guess, the structuralists still believed words meant something while the poststructuralists argued that words were meaningless. Here is Derrida on the matter,
How can another see into me, into my most secret self, without my being able to see in there myself? And without my being able to see him in me. And if my secret self, that which can be revealed only to the other, to the wholly other, to God if you wish, is a secret that I will never reflect on, that I will never know or experience or possess as my own, then what sense is there in saying that it is my secret, or in saying more generally that a secret belongs, that it is proper to or belongs to some one, or to some other who remains someone. It's perhaps there that we find the secret of secrecy. Namely, that it is not a matter of knowing and that it is there for no one. A secret doesn't belong, it can never be said to be at home or in its place. The question of the self: who am I not in the sense of who am I but rather who is this I that can say who? What is the- I and what becomes of responsibility once the identity of the I trembles in secret?Did you get that? Me neither. It is all the gibber-gabber of a fool writing nonsense arguing that all writing is nonsense. In this way, Derrida turns his own language into a foreign language that is unable to be understood even by himself. But like Lacan, Derrida wedded his nonsense to celebrity and became a big deal. The world has suffered for it ever since.
Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault was a French sodomite who was born in 1924 and died in 1984 after his lover(s) pumped disease into his shattered anus which resulted in his contraction of AIDS which killed him. These scandalous facts matter because Foucault pumped large amounts of his intellectual disease into the shattered minds of the postmodern world which these fools gladly accepted. As Foucault put it,
I wasn't always smart, I was actually very stupid in school ... There was a boy who was very attractive who was even stupider than I was. And in order to ingratiate myself with this boy who was very beautiful, I began to do his homework for him—and that's how I became smart, I had to do all this work to just keep ahead of him a little bit, in order to help him. In a sense, all the rest of my life I've been trying to do intellectual things that would attract beautiful boys.So , Foucault pretended to be clever in order to get laid. Since he was slightly more clever than the other academic idiots, Foucault must have succeeded in this endeavor. You don't really have to be a genius in life when you can just fool people into thinking that you're a genius. Foucault was a real genius at this sort of thing.
Foucault had one distinct advantage. He wrote clearly. You can read Foucault and actually understand him. What made him different was that he was utterly amoral and nihilistic. The only constants in his thinking was a favoritism for the underdog in the fight against power. This is why he could support communism at one time and oppose it at another time. It is how he found support for both the Ayatollah Khomeini, Jews, and the Solidarity movement in Poland. Try getting all those groups in a room together.
The only consistent thing with Foucault was his love of the revolution and the revolutionary. There were no overarching ideas of justice or morality with Foucault. There was only power. Taking ideas from Nietzsche, Foucault made it fashionable for left wingers to be fascists, too. Of course, the moment they won the fight, Foucault would probably oppose them. This is why Foucault was instrumental in the campus revolutions of the 1960s and 70s but would probably oppose the PC thought control that exists on campuses today.
For some odd reason, Foucault is a likable fellow despite being an amoral nihilist. I think it may be because he was a snappy dresser and looked really good with a shaved head. I don't know. But this is what Noam Chomsky had to say about Foucault:
"He struck me as completely amoral, I'd never met anyone who was so totally amoral. I mean, I liked him personally, it's just that I couldn't make sense of him. It's as if he was from a different species, or something.Foucault believed that knowledge was power and that language and discourse were means of control. Therefore, you should strive to change that discourse in order to gain power. Power is all that matters and not truth or justice. This is the thinking behind today's plethora of crap majors like Women's Studies. African-American Studies, Queer Studies, Transgender Studies, and on and on.
The impact on the study of literature is that the accepted meanings of texts are rejected and reimagined in terms of power relationships. This is how you get things like "male privilege," "white privilege," "cisgender privilege," and on and on. Language is reduced to a tool of repression and must be deconstructed and reconstructed into a tool of revolution. Eventually, you go beyond that to the absurdity that mathematics is racist and sexist.
Why did Foucault see the world in this way? It all comes from his homosexual perversion. In the world of sodomy, you are either on the top or on the bottom. You are either violating or being violated. There is nothing more to existence than this power relationship. And if you think I am pushing this madness too far, Foucault was deep into the world of gay BDSM and extolled it as "the real creation of new possibilities of pleasure, which people had no idea about previously."
This power thesis comes from Nietzsche's concept of the will to power applied in realms and ways beyond Nietzsche's corroded mind of his time. The Nazis made use of this madness for their ends, so why can't everyone else do the same for their ends? In a world beyond good and evil, there only remains power and submission. This is what makes Shakespeare a homophobic cisgender privileged antisemitic white male chauvinist unless you think Shakespeare was a closeted homosexual which radically alters your reading of Richard III.
Julia Kristeva
Julia Kristeva's primary claim to fame is being a girl who rose to prominence in a boy's club of bullsh*t. Combining the ideas of Lacan, the inscrutability of Derrida, and following in the wake of Foucault's revolution, Kristeva took her deconstructionist crap to ever greater heights of complete gibberish. But I don't need to say all of that. Here is what Kristeva had to say,
That quotation makes it all clear. Kristeva could shovel crap just as well as Lacan and Derrida. But wait, there's more:Mimesis is, precisely, the construction of an object, not according to truth but to verisimilitude, to the extent that the object is posited as such (hence separate, noted but not denoted); it is, however, internally dependent on a subject of enunciation who is unlike the transcendental ego in that he does not suppress the semiotic chora but instead raises the chora to the status of signifier, which may or may not obey the norms of grammatical locution. Such is the connoted mimetic object.
The other that will guide you and itself through this dissolution is a rhythm, text, music, and within language, a text. But what is the connection that holds you both together? Counter-desire, the negative of desire, inside-out desire, capable of questioning (or provoking) its own infinite quest. Romantic, filial, adolescent, exclusive, blind and Oedipal: it is all that, but for others. It returns to where you are, both of you, disappointed, irritated, ambitious, in love with history, critical, on the edge and even in the midst of its own identity crisis; a crisis of enunciation and of the interdependence of its movements, an instinctual drive that descends in waves, tearing apart the symbolic thesis.It was writing like this that garnered numerous awards and accolades for this woman who wrote pure crap. These accolades would not have come had Kristeva possessed a penis. But the fact that a woman could dazzle the world with pure nonsense is a superlative achievement.
Removing the Emperor's New Clothes
Now, when a modern artist defecates on a canvas and hangs it in a gallery, people immediately recognize it for the excrement that it is. Likewise, when avant garde serialist music is played, even the untrained ear will tell you that it is noise. But with the deconstructionists, calling out the bullsh*t is harder because we encounter many things in academia that are confusing when we read them. This could be a book on Einstein's theories or a history of China written in Chinese. Usually, when we don't understand a thing, we look to our peers to tell us that this work is worthwhile and profound even if we don't understand it. If you take the time to learn calculus and Chinese, it will actually make sense.
With these deconstructionists, nothing they say will ever make sense. This is because it is nonsense. But if you question this nonsense, you run the risk of being seen as some sort of dumb ass. So, you keep your mouth shut and go along with your peers who claim this crap is brilliant. The reality is that they possess the same fear of being outed as a dumb ass just like you. The result is a mutual gaslighting until someone has the courage and the humility to call it out for what it is.
One of the people who has no problem calling out these fools is Sir Roger Scruton who is something these fools never were--an actual intellectual. Here is what he had to say about our current topic:
It would be nice to merely dismiss these fools as fools, but they have become dangerous fools as deconstruction has infected other fields and explains the current fascination with puberty blockers and penis removal among boys. It is not just literature but reality itself which can be deconstructed and reconstructed to reflect whatever you choose.There are philosophers who have repudiated the goal of truth -- Nietzsche, for example, who argued that there are no truths, only interpretations. But you need only ask yourself whether what Nietzsche says is true, to realize how paradoxical it is. (If it is true, then it is false! -- an instance of the so-called 'liar' paradox.) Likewise, the French philosopher Michel Foucault repeatedly argues as though the 'truth' of an epoch has no authority outside of the power-structure that endorses it. There is no trans-historical truth about the human condition. But again, we should ask ourselves whether that last statement is true: for if it is true, it is false. There has arisen among modernist philosophers a certain paradoxism which has served to put them out of communication with those of their contemporaries who are merely modern. A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is "merely relative," is asking you not to believe him. So don't.
As far as I know, Sokal is a leftist and an atheist. But science makes him believe in objective truths which today makes you a conservative. This is a guy who could no longer stand the stench coming from the other side of the campus in the philosophy and English departments. So, he did an experiment to make his point. He discovered the objective truth that deconstructionists are full of crap.But why did I do it? I confess that I'm an unabashed Old Leftist who never quite understood how deconstruction was supposed to help the working class. And I'm a stodgy old scientist who believes, naively, that there exists an external world, that there exist objective truths about that world, and that my job is to discover some of them.
Like Sokal, I hope that I have made my point. Deconstructionism is part of the larger disease known as postmodernism where God is dead, men can be women, and truth cannot be known but can be asserted with as much ferocity as you can muster. The whole goal of deconstruction is to change reality itself. But as I said at the beginning, this is an argument that I cannot lose. Words do convey meaning except when those words belong to these architects of deconstruction. Then, those words truly are meaningless garbage that we can safely ignore. What can't be ignored is the danger these fools have brought to the modern mind. Without truth and the means to convey this truth, what else is there? It is only madness and opinion which is an apt description of the left wing of today.
