Deconstructivism - Prof. Stanley Fish - PhillyBlog

tbdiscovery · #1 (**permalink**) 04-07-2008, 02:04 PM

Quote:

French Theory in America

It was in sometime in the ’80s when I heard someone on the radio talking about Clint Eastwood’s 1980 movie “Bronco Billy.” It is, he said, a “nice little film in which Eastwood deconstructs his ‘Dirty Harry’ image.”

That was probably not the first time the verb “deconstruct” was used casually to describe a piece of pop culture, but it was the first time I had encountered it, and I remember thinking that the age of theory was surely over now that one of its key terms had been appropriated, domesticated and commodified. It had also been used with some precision.

What the radio critic meant was that the flinty masculine realism of the “Dirty Harry” movies — it’s a hard world and it takes a hard man to deal with its evils — is affectionately parodied in the story of a former New Jersey shoe salesman who dresses and talks like a tough cowboy, but is the good-hearted proprietor of a traveling Wild West show aimed at little children. It’s all an act , a confected fable, but so is Dirty Harry; so is everything. If deconstruction was something that an American male icon performed, there was no reason to fear it; truth, reason and the American way were safe.

It turned out, of course, that my conclusion was hasty and premature, for it was in the early ’90s that the culture wars went into high gear and the chief target of the neo-conservative side was this theory that I thought had run its course. It became clear that it had a second life, or a second run, as the villain of a cultural melodrama produced and starred in by Alan Bloom, Dinesh D’Souza, Roger Kimball and other denizens of the right, even as its influence was declining in the academic precincts this crew relentlessly attacked.

It’s a great story, full of twists and turns, and now it has been told in extraordinary detail in a book to be published next month: “French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States” (University of Minnesota Press)...

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...tml?8ty&emc=ty

Any takers?

tbdiscovery · #2 (**permalink**) 04-21-2008, 05:56 PM

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0...tml?8ty&emc=ty

MarketStEl · #3 (**permalink**) 04-21-2008, 06:07 PM

This will require far more time than I have to devote to it right now, as neither Stanley Fish nor French theory lend themselves to easy reading on the 5:21 into town.

But I note that Fish, in the course of defending the French from their conservative detractors in the United States, says after a fashion that it all really started with Hobbes:

“True and false are attributes of speech, not of things.”

Unfortunately, the argument since then has been nasty and brutish, but anything but short.

tbdiscovery · #4 (**permalink**) 04-24-2008, 11:40 AM

I've been wanting to lay into this, but I'm not trusting PB's stability at the moment. I will say that deconstruction is amazing, within itself, simply because there is no definitive definition and much of the argument concerns the structure, or lack thereof, of the word itself. Derrida refrained from calling it a critique simply because it would be considered analysis, and then deconstruction would not be able to analyze the concept of critiques. It can't fit into a category because it utilizes categories, such as analysis and critique, to refute perceptions.

MarketStEl · #5 (**permalink**) 04-24-2008, 06:00 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tbdiscovery

I've been wanting to lay into this, but I'm not trusting PB's stability at the moment. I will say that deconstruction is amazing, within itself, simply because there is no definitive definition and much of the argument concerns the structure, or lack thereof, of the word itself. Derrida refrained from calling it a critique simply because it would be considered analysis, and then deconstruction would not be able to analyze the concept of critiques. It can't fit into a category because it utilizes categories, such as analysis and critique, to refute perceptions.

The theoretical equivalent of an M.C. Escher painting, then?

Illiniwek · #6 (**permalink**) 04-24-2008, 07:29 PM

Well, since the OP, like any other text, has no normative meaning, outside what I, or "I," construct for it, and since such meaning is inherently categorical, imperatively situational and epistemologically suspect, it would be silly to respond to it, wouldn't it?