The Fall of Literary Theory. Liana Vrajitoru Andreasen
from deconstruction) to challenge patterns of thought, students have been stepping into the real world, where undoubtedly they have made dents in deeply rooted mentalities. And I am not, again, randomly linking causes and effects just to suit an argument.
I also happen to be the product of the dissemination of poststructuralist and deconstructive ideas, as a student of a student of Derrida and having dedicated my graduate years to “theory.” I have no choice but to disseminate these ideas as I teach—it is not even because I have convinced myself that I have a doctrine to preach or because I am an idolater of Lacan and Derrida. Poststructuralist deconstruction is part of my teaching because it is now part of my thinking. This is precisely how I identify the type of impact I believe “theory” has had over a few generations already, and why literary analysis (with the help of theory) is the one bastion of de-centering thought that can never be forced to go away. It will continue to challenge power, no matter how much the funding for liberal arts studies is slashed. “Literature” is the safest way to question the world since, just as an example, the political discussion can be veiled under literary analysis, while students can safely hide behind characters, to avoid escalation during sensitive debates.
I have been teaching for over 15 years, and in all this time I have seen how the classroom offered the (mostly) safe type of environment where people were allowed to hit their own walls of prejudice, see their systemic thought mirrored in other students, dare to listen to different rationales than the ones they had come in with, and in the end, the dialogue has been changing practically before my eyes. At the college in South Texas where I teach, to continue with the convenient example of gay marriage (since it has recently won the legal debate), I have noticed the same gradual change, over the years, that the country has been noticing, until the minority became the majority and the voices of prejudice and intolerance became the exception, not the norm. I myself am the product of classrooms where I learned to deconstruct myself, most of all, and my bicultural identity. My own transformation is still spilling over into my classroom.
There should, therefore, be no question whether the theory of deconstruction or poststructuralist analysis should still be taught in literature classes or not. What should still be debated, perhaps, is how it can help cope with shifts in the political landscape and how “literature” (from the most ancient classic texts to contemporary works) can be made relevant in every new context. It would be up to the readers of this book to decide the way it should be taught, to what extent, and what can still be expected to result from the all-but-dismissed use of theory.
Aside from offering my own approach to theory through new uses of the concept of the fall, I also offer some practical applications. I will not deny that the chapters in the “Applications” section of this book may not seem very practical, as they delve quite deeply (though less abstractly, since they rely on literary texts) into the “theory” with which I challenge absolutist thought. Hopefully, at the end of the day they will show the usefulness (maybe not the easiness) of such a challenge, through a type of literary analysis that I believe can never be irrelevant.
To begin with, before we are ready to abandon concepts to competencies in literary studies and the humanities in general, we need to reexamine the purpose of reading and teaching literature to begin with. Roger Scruton would be happy to return to a formalist unfolding of meaning in front of students since, after all, a metaphor is always a metaphor. We don’t, presumably, want the poor student to wonder what kind of knowledge we possess if we can’t even pinpoint exactly where that meaning can be found, and on what page, and whether it will be on the test.
I am not merely a Derridean deconstructionist. To me, Derrida’s deconstruction is the logical conclusion of a line of thinking that began with the challenge brought to Saussurian structuralism, most notably by Lacan. Lacan’s challenge to the chain of signification and binary thought, combined with his struggle to connect the dots of signification and link them to the alienating desire for signification that founds identity, for which he found tools in Freud’s psychoanalysis, has enabled the different branches of poststructuralist thought to expand: Julia Kristeva’s injection of the feminine into the symbolic order, Jean Francois Lyotard’s interest in history as narrative of legitimation, Jean Baudrillard’s simulacra, Slavoj Žižek’s more politically charged voice as he refashions Marxism, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, who angered Lacan by challenging the Oedipus complex, Emmanuel Levinas’ ethical concerns with the face and the call of the Other, and, perhaps the most popular, Derrida’s deconstruction. Derrida, for one, mentored directly some of his followers, such as the group called the Yale School or those who were his friends over the years—Levinas, Paul de Man, Hélène Cixous, among others. However, in truth, the conversation did not go only in one direction, and many of the theorists and philosophers of the last decades of the 20th century were, whether they admitted it or not, relying on each other to shape their own ideas, even when they were bitterly disputing the nuances in how they differed or what brought them together.
But before we can decide if what is called theory (which, of course, can be many things) has failed, or was already doomed to fail as soon as it was formulated, it would be wise to pay attention to what it was meant to achieve in the first place, at least according to its more prominent stars. In Deconstruction and the Other, Derrida himself confesses that “the available codes for taking such a political stance are not at all adequate to the radicality of deconstruction …. I try where I can to act politically while recognizing that such action remains incommensurable with my intellectual project of deconstruction.”4 Following the same idea, Gayatri Spivak explains that deconstruction is not a political project, or it would be irresponsible to attempt to harness it to a political program. Take, for instance, the practice of Marxist theory, one I am very familiar with having grown up in a communist country before moving to the US. Marxist application is an example of how destructive a “theory” can become when coupled with politics. Marx’ theory critiquing capital should have never become a social experiment and should have remained just that, a critique. If changing the world hadn’t been taken so literally, Marxism would have had a less ambitious but more desirable effect if it had remained subtle and had let its impact be felt within a few generations. As it happened, it was the practice that killed the good intentions of the theory, and a place like North Korea is still feeling the direct effect of turning theory into a system. Yet, as will be seen later, if one attempts to redeem the theory by claiming that only the practice was misguided, wrong or fallen, then the theory will have the same potential for violence as before, if a new, “improved” practice arises.
In his “Letter to a Japanese Friend,” Derrida recalls the time when he selected this word, deconstruction, and explains that he specifically avoided words that would have suggested annihilation (such as “destruction”). It is not as revolutionary a concept as many have wished it to be, especially as Derrida warned against limiting the scope of deconstruction by either limiting it to linguistics, or by turning it into a mechanical model. To him, such models lead to a misunderstanding of what his, and others’ theories are in fact meant for, which is “deconstructive questioning.”5 It is not even an anti-structuralist urge, even though the term popular in the United States, “poststructuralism,” may seem to indicate that. What I think is the simplest, most crystal-clear definition of purpose that Derrida has to offer is this: “Rather than destroying, it was … necessary to understand how an ‘ensemble’ was constituted and to reconstruct it to this end.”6 The end, he insists, is “undoing, decomposing, desedimenting” in a way that is not a negative operation but rather a genealogical restoration. It is, he also points out, not merely a (Kantian) critique or an analysis (in the sense of taking apart to find an origin). It is not even a method. Seeing it as a simple tool to be used in university classrooms can lead to wrong turns and misguided seductions. He sees it as an “event” that continues to take place, cannot be pinpointed, taught as a theme or object, or a destination. His own essays, in his mind, are “modest symptoms of it, quite as much as tentative interpretations.”7 Even as everyone sees him as an originator of such an event, he only sees himself as its observer, and also the one who tried to describe it in repeated attempts. If that is the case, the event is still taking place, and students