Reader-Response under review: art, game, or science?

Style, Winter, 1995 by Terence R. Wright

Derrida recognizes that however much we may try to exorcise our ghosts, to escape from our past (and Marx criticizes Max Stirner for failing fully to rid himself of Hegelian ghostly abstractions), "everyone reads, acts, writes with his or her ghosts, even when one goes after the ghosts of others" (139). Readers of Derrida too will recognize the ghosts of arguments past in his deconstruction of the opposition Marx tries to establish between use-value and exchange-value. Just as Rousseau's attempt to distinguish nature from culture was doomed to fail (his notion of nature being itself culturally mediated), so Marx can never reach that pure table uncontaminated by cultural ghosts:

Just as there is no pure use, there is no use-value which the possibility of exchange and commercen . . . has not in advance inscribed in an out-of-use - an excessive signification that cannot be reduced to the useless . . . this limit-concept of use-value is in advance contaminated, that is, pre-occupied, inhabited, haunted by its other, namely, what will be born from the wooden head of the table, the commodity-form, and its ghost dance. (160)

Ghosts will no doubt continue to haunt the discourse of deconstruction for years to come, but if they lead critics back to as careful and responsible a reading as Derrida gives to Marx, that development will be welcomed rather than deplored.

That Derrida has himself become a kind of specter is confirmed by Stanley Fish in his recent book There's No Such Thing as Free Speech and It's a Good Thing, Too. Fish is particularly scathing about the resort of reactionaries in the academic world to a version of scaremongering about "political correctness," deconstruction, and other bogies. A remark mistakenly attributed to Foucault about Derrida being "the kind of philosopher who gives bullshit a bad name" (traced in fact to a Princeton philosopher referring to a small portion of Derrida's work that he found less convincing than the rest of his writing) is too often trotted out for the relieved laughter of "those who are happy to see the specter of their fears dissipated by a cheap and inaccurate joke" (98). Fish offers little comfort to those who hoped deconstruction would "fade away like a bad dream": "if there is now no vigorous discussion of deconstruction in the academy, it is because its lessons have been absorbed and its formulations - the irreducibility of difference, the priority of the signifier over the signified, the social construction of the self - have been canonized" (57). But, Fish is remarkably sanguine about the literary profession in general. In spite of its continuing propensity to despise itself, to make itself as uncomfortable as possible, to buy Volvos and to eat anyone's shit, Fish feels that "the revolution . . . has succeeded," by which he means that the institution has managed to retool to adapt itself to new circumstances. For change, according to Fish, whose last book described the way it was achieved by submission to authority, should not be frightening: it is "the means by which continuity is achieved and reachieved. Tradition does not preserve itself by pushing away novelty and difference but by accommodating them" (271). But more to do with Volvos than with politics, it is a concept of revolution that not everyone will share.