Glen Scott Allen

English Department
Towson State University
e7e4all@toe.towson.edu

 

Derrida, Jacques. Cinders. Tr. Ned Lukacher. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991.

 

Derrida, Jacques. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe. Tr. Pascale-Anne Brault & Michael B. Naas. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.

 

I. Burials Past & Faster

 

“The true wretchedness . . . is particular, not diffuse.”¹ So begins Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Premature Burial,” one of many Poe tales which has found its way to the movie screen as a British Hammer production, becoming in the transition all lurid technicolor drapes and heaving white bosoms. Of course, the movie version defers the prematurity of the burial as long as possible and finds its climax–as we knew it would–in the crypt with the heroine reacting in hyperbolic horror to the “true wretchedness” of her premature burial. The premature burial.

 

Or so the film version would have it. One irony (among so many) of the film’s misreading of the story is the slavish attention paid to that little word “The.” Poe’s story in fact begins with accounts of several premature burials, the better to establish ethos for the premise of his story, to grant it “verisimilitude,” (to mix Russian with American horror). Poe knows that, by supplying various examples, the particular will become credible; will even, through the sleight-of-hand of logic, become the exemplar of those examples. The premature burial–the exemplary, or “standard” premature burial.

 

And yet Poe realized that, while the logos of his story might rest on the general structure of inductive reasoning, its “single effect”–that which Poe believed defined a successful short story–resided not in the conceptual accumulation of generalized (as in “made vague”) instances, but rather in the specific image of the narrator–“man the unit”–undergoing the individualized tortures of being buried alive. These seemingly opposite requirements–that an example be representative, yet somehow unique–are what we might term the paradox of exemplarity. More about this paradox in the section on Derrida’s Cinders.

 

But in fact the greatest irony of Hammer’s “adaptation” of Poe’s story is that in “The Premature Burial” there is no the premature burial at all; the narrator misreads the signs of temporary confinement for those of eternal interment. And in much the same fashion, the Academy in general (as in “widely but not completely”) have misread–with a haste usually reserved for cholera victims–the “signs” of the death of deconstruction and the interment of Derridean criticism.

 

In fact, the stampede to denounce deconstruction has been so precipitous as to trample on the venerable traditions of mourning; and this, in a profession where Tradition is the constant specter, the incorruptible monument. The “mourners” at deconstruction’s graveside have skipped right over the Eulogy and proceeded, with undisguised glee, to the Obloquy–the stage of hypercriticism which would normally follow burial by a respectable period of reassessment; a stage generally (as in “popularly”) arrived at gradually, reluctantly and sincerely.

 

Emeritus Yalie C. Van Woodward blithely writes of deconstruction’s “brief and tormented” history.² Jonathan Yardley suggests, to everyone who will publish, that deconstruction has breathed its “last gasp.” And in a viciously enthusiastic (and woefully inaccurate) article supposedly “debunking” deconstruction, poet David Lehman argues from the premise that “the fortunes of deconstruction as an academic phalanx have declined,” using as spokesmodels everyone from Robert “Iron Man” Bly to “former” deconstructionist Barbara Johnson.³

 

While it may seem shooting ducks in a barrel to attack the rusty dreadnaughts of Old Criticism like Woodward and Yardley (and Lehman), in fact the ranks of crocodile mourners are not limited to these scholastic neo-conservatives; they simply gloat the loudest.

 

After all, “ex” deconstructionist Barbara Johnson did indeed give a talk entitled “The Wake of Deconstruction” at last summer’s School of Theory and Criticism at Dartmouth College. Recent editorials in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the MLA Newsletter speak of deconstruction in the assured past tense. And, however thoroughly the word “deconstruction” is disseminated in the academic and even public discourse, the Yale School rarely uses the “D-word” anymore.⁴ Even those in favor of a reconstruction of deconstruction have accepted that, as Jeffrey Nealon writes in a recent and extremely useful essay in PMLA, “Deconstruction . . . is dead in literature departments today.”⁵

 

Is deconstruction dead and buried? Or merely buried?

 

In Poe’s story, the examples of premature burials turn on the living too soon surrendering their responsibility for the (apparently) dead, as they consistently and curiously resist all efforts at scrutiny or autopsy. In its social and historical context, “The Premature Burial” might be seen as representing a general (as in recognizable but not necessarily locatable) anxiety of mid-19th century America over the increasingly indistinct boundary between the irrelevant and ritualistic requirements of the past and the insistent and material demands of the present.⁶ Thus the narrator of Poe’s story searches for the reliable sign of death and the dependable limit of indebtedness; a sign and a limit that will provide a specific, quantifiable answer to the question, When exactly might the past be memorialized, and thus forgotten?

 

Derrida’s Cinders (1991) and The Other Heading (1992) directly engage this question by separating it into two questions; questions which are perhaps the two most important problems of the emerging 21st century: How do we both “acknowledge” indebtedness to the past and yet free ourselves from its icy clasp? And how do we “negotiate” the seemingly mutually exclusive demands of pluralism and social cohesion?

 

Derrida frames these questions as the paradox of the past, and the paradox of the example.⁷

 

II. Elegiac Cinders

 

The importance of acknowledging the past is everywhere present in Derrida’s works. In many ways, Cinders is an “exhibition” of Derrida’s ideas about the elusive mechanism of meaning and its relationship to the past. And like an exhibition, one senses throughout the presence of his past influences and works.

 

The title Cinders is a simplification of the untranslatable feu la cendre⁸. The book deals with a “specter” which has haunted Derrida for nearly a decade, this “specter” being the phrase il y a la cendre: “cinders there are”–with an accent grave over the ‘a’ of la, thus doubling the sense in which the word means “there”; a phrase which appears first in La Dissemination, and recurs in partial and various incarnations in many of his other works since, most notably the “Envois” section of The Post Card. And ghosts of other prior works enter as the refrain of remembrance (il y a la cendre) weaves its way through a text which is structurally reminiscent of Glas (1974).

 

On the left hand side of the page are short quotes from earlier works, passages which bear in one way or another on the idea of cinders, burning, residue, invisible remainders. Derrida titles these notes “Animadversions” (observations), both to capture their nature as brief musings, and to acknowledge the French avant garde journal Anima, a forum for the exploration of language which is, appropriately, no more. The animadversions are there to suggest (as in “fanning an ember”) reverberations to the text on the right hand side of the page, which is a “philosophical prose poem” about, around, within the paradox of antecedents, debts; expressions as constant eulogy, incomplete epitaph, dysfunctional nostalgia–all in search of “she,” the cinder.

 

While some critics might see in this exhibition a “repetition” of favorite Derridean themes, this retrospective approach is most appropriate here. There is a certain melancholic undertone to Cinders; the sort of melancholy resident in works which eulogize the end of one period and inaugurate the beginning of another.

 

And thus, as Ned Lukacher points out in an often brilliant introduction “Morning Becomes Telepathy,” Cinders is anything but old wine in new bottles. Lukacher grapples with the meaning of the word “cinder” and the phrase il y a la cendre in an “overview” of Derridean sources, influences and concerns. For instance, he brings Hegel’s notion of the Klang, “the ‘Ringing’ at the origin of language” into the discussion, and suggests a connection between this primeval trace as sound for Hegel, and later as “spirit” (Geist) or “flame” for Heidegger. Thus cinders become what is left after a holocaust–“Pure and figureless, this light burns all. It burns itself in the all-burning [le brule-tout]” (42). An all-burning which leaves nothing; nothing, perhaps, but an “oscillation”: “It is the heat within the resonance of this oscillation that Derrida names la cendre” (3).

 

Cinder is, too, the latest in a long line of terms–trace, differance, trail–with which Derrida has struggled to name “these remains without remainder.” Lukacher suggests an analogy with quarks: “Cinders are the quarks of language, neither proper names nor metaphors” (1).

 

While Lukacher suggests that quarks keep “a space open into which the truth, or its impossibility, might come,” it is more appropriate to metaphorize them as the the illogical logic of metaphor itself; as that “leap” of human imagination which creates similarities out of distances. Quarks are indivisible from the particles which they “make up.” That is to say, they exist only as the relationship of intersecting energy and matter which appears to us as those particles. They are all event, no structure. Thus cinders are quarks in the sense the term indicates a “site” of meaning which is non-local and a “duration” of meaning which is without origin or end.

 

Cinders are there; there are cinders. “There” is both assertion of location and of existence. Of location as existence. The ‘a’ (accent grave) of the “there” which “locates” the cinder is also meant to “suggest a feminine register” to the voice of the text, as well as to indicate that the word is not transparent, that it “burns” with the “incineration of the indefinite article.”

 

The phrase, the word, the text all “burn” also with a plurality of voices. Heidegger particularly haunts these pages. Heidegger “emphasize[d] the delicate nature of the relation between language and truth; between figure and idea, between . . . Dichten (to write) . . . and Denken (to think)” (2)–acts which Lukacher writes are “held apart by a delicate yet luminous difference.” Heidegger referred to this difference as a “rift (Riss),” something like (and unlike, of course) the gap “between” the two components of a metaphor. This “holding itself is a relation,” that is to say, an event borne of, but not resident in the functioning of difference, the mechanics of signification.

 

This relation is a tension, and this tension is as close as we can perhaps get to “placing” meaning–just as a flame is as close as we get to associating a “thereness” with pure energy. Put in terms of the binary models we must leave behind: meaning is neither something “fissioned” by the breaking up of the metaphysical dichotomy, nor “fused” through the synthesis of the dialectic. The tension, the relation, the residue itself is the event of meaning: elastic, non-local, always uncertain–but always present.

 

The prose poem section of Cinders is as difficult to “decipher” as anything Derrida has written: personal, self-referential, elusive, allusive, fragile. Everything, that is, which describes the cinders which there are. But it is also as rewarding as any of his other works. In combination with the distinctly different Derridean text The Other Heading, and recent articles urging a reconstruction of Derridean analysis, perhaps the “death” of deconstruction can be exposed as greatly exaggerated.

 

For instance, Nealon argues in the PMLA that most of the current attacks on deconstruction–in fact much of the anti-deconstruction criticism of the last twenty years–has in fact been based on mis-readings of Derridean thought; misreadings circulated and codified by his earliest American translators. While I won’t rehearse Nealon’s argument in its entirety here, it is central enough to my discussion of the importance of these two works to refer to at some length.

 

Nealon begins by observing that deconstruction’s critics have typically charged its practitioners with “simply denying meaning or interpretation by showing how oppositions . . . cancel themselves out” (emphasis added). Along with this charge come the ancillary criticisms that it is apolitical, ahistorical, acontextual, and amoral. But it should be clear that the primary charge–that it seeks neutrality–governs all the others, whether the neutrality claimed is historical or moral. And thus at the root of most anti-deconstructive rhetoric is the indictment that it is inherently nihilistic. Anyone who thinks such an attack comically overheated need look no further than David Lehman’s essay.

 

While Lehman begins quite typically by claiming that the major fault of deconstructive criticism is “those binary reversals that come as second nature to the initiates of the mysteries of deconstruction,” his argument soon begins leaping from deconstruction to Derrida to de Man to conformity to Nazis, as though all of these topics were quite obviously connected at the conceptual hip. “After the de Man affair, deconstruction will never again be a harmless thrilling thing–we have seen how it can be used to fudge facts, obfuscate truths, distort and mislead” (5). Lehman grandly, and ominously concludes that “the political system most consonant with deconstructive principles is authoritarian” (4).

 

Perhaps the problem of Lehman and neo-conservative critics like him is most grave, at least within the academy, because this strain of “thought” is within the academy–a tenacious moral smugness that is more dangerous than outright conservatism because it presents itself as a “new” humanism. While Lehman “concede[s] that some of the tactics and procedures of deconstruction, if used judiciously, may lead to fruitful ends” (if used judiciously? Fruitful ends?) still he is quick to warn of “[t]he marked absence of moral seriousness” in deconstructive criticism (8).

 

Perhaps that phrase “moral seriousness” reveals the heart of Lehman’s resentment toward Derrida. There has always been a sense of play about Derrida’s writing which seems to frustrate and infuriate die-hard formalists who believe criticism can only be worth reading if it is “serious,” i.e., hermeneutically sealed.

 

But Lehman’s prescription rings of the rhetoric of chapels, not classrooms. David Lehman and his familiars seem academic Cotton Mathers, ready to divide critics into the preterite and the damned, using as their standard the presence or absence of “moral seriousness.” (Never was a phrase more ripe for the very sort of “authoritarian” manipulation that Lehman ironically claims resides in Derridean analysis.) Of course, there is an important distinction to be made between neo-conservative critics of deconstruction like Woodward and Lehman, and those critics who engage Derrida and deconstruction on more “constructive” grounds.⁹

 

Still, the root charge leveled at Derrida’s work specifically and deconstruction generally (as in a concept if not a body of criticism) most often stems from that word “neutrality” and the echoes of nihilism it summons up.

 

III. Digging the Neutral Grave

 

Again, Lehman is a useful representative of this fundamental misreading, arguing that, as “deconstructionists frequently collapse the difference between a thing and its opposite” then what deconstruction produces is “the absence of difference” (1).¹⁰

 

Of course, the word “neutralization” was indeed used by Derrida in describing the “reversal” of dichotomies which often begins the deconstructive reading. However, what was often overlooked in the early translations was what followed: “To remain content with this reversal is of course to operate within the immanence of the system to be destroyed.” More importantly, “to sit back . . . and take an attitude of neutralizing indifference with respect to the classical oppositions would be to give free rein to the existing forces that effectively and historically dominate the field” Dissemination 6; emphasis added). And even when American disseminators of Derridean concepts remarked on the importance of this second step, they seemed at a loss to explain what it meant.¹¹

 

Yet, while some critics working toward a reconstruction of Derridean analysis have made this observation, still very few (Judith Butler comes to mind as one recent exception)¹² have paid sufficient attention to revisioning that term “neutralization.” For example, Nealon himself doesn’t seem to realize that what Derrida meant by “neutralization” is quite significantly different than what he and nearly every American interpreter has meant by the word.

 

While Nealon differentiates between Derrida’s concept of “undecidability” and de Man’s of “unreadability,” still he quotes the de Manian notion that “A text . . . can literally be called ‘unreadable’ in that it leads to a set of assertions that radically exclude each other,” and then claims that “this definition would, of course, hold for Derrida also” (1272). I believe this to be a key, and again typical error, in that, for Derrida, a text is never unreadable. For instance, Derrida states in “Positions” that “the play of differences involves syntheses and referrals that prevent there from being at any moment or in any way a simple element that is present in and of itself and refers only to itself” (38). And by “itself” he would include, no doubt, the “singular” element of unreadability. Again, the whole notion of “unreadable” or “utterly absent” or “paralyzed” meaning–all terms which de Man used as synonyms for the result of the “neutralization” of oppositions–is simply too reductionist, too rooted in concepts of “particular” meaning; concepts which Derrida works everywhere to deconstruct.

 

Perhaps the problem here is analogical. The image typically summoned by the term “neutralization” is a maneuver which brings together a particular meaning and its antithesis in a violent collision, resulting in an “annihilation” of meaning. Deconstruction thus becomes the antithesis of interpretation, and deconstructive readings are seen as leaving smoldering holes in a text. But there is all the differance in the world between Derrida’s enriching “undecidability” and de Man’s constricting “unreadability.” And there is every indication in Derridean thought that the “neutralization” of binarisms results not in annihilation, but rather in a state of continual engagement.

 

In the “turn of dominance” which has been an analytical tool since Nietzsche, the binary poles must first be shown to be, in the traditional discourse, decidedly unequal in “valence.” Thus the genealogical revision (more than reversion) of the terms is an absolutely necessary step in shaking the terms loose from their accumulated cultural denotations; especially, for Derrida, as those denotations grant a greater “moral authority” to one term than the other. And of course the term Derrida came to use for this moral authority was “presence.”¹³

 

But Derrida has always asked us to imagine instead that meaning is not “particular”; that it does not reside in “positive and negative” terms, but rather that it is inextricably resident within the tension between terms, between competing cultural forces which always tug towards interpretations of the coupled terms that validate their particular social and historical agenda.¹⁴ Thus Derrida’s first move is to “overturn” the struggle by demonstrating how each “side’s” definition of the term is utterly inscribed in the other “side’s” definition. However, even after this first act of revision the two forces are both still engaged–the term’s meaning is still a result of a tension, but what is now a revised tension, a tension freed of “moral authority” based on presence and ideality. Thus the “meaning” of any such coupling is a product of (at least) two competing cultural agencies, and not some “thing” resident in any particular site. Again, what Derrida is working so diligently toward is an understanding of meaning as event rather than structure.¹⁵

 

Even more importantly, for Derrida meaning never doesn’t exist–not at any moment of the deconstructive process. Meaning is elusive, mobile, inevitably non-local–but it is not something which can be annihilated, rendered somehow irrelevant. Thus Derridean deconstruction is consistently and fundamentally anti-nihilistic.

 

But what of American deconstruction? Is “continental” deconstruction the “pure” form, and our American brand a flawed import?

 

I am not suggesting we draw up a list of “good” and “bad” deconstructors, nor that we should use the Atlantic Ocean as a gulf separating “true” from “false” deconstruction. However, some forms of criticism which come under the general heading of “deconstruction” seem in fact only tenuously connected to Derrida’s ideas and techniques.

 

For instance, de Man’s “unreadable” reductions of texts work in a direction quite different from Derrida’s “undecidable” explorations. While de Man is primarily interested in rhetorical “impasses” which render interpretation stalemated, Derrida concentrates instead on mythologies of origin and closure, on those places in any text which “ground” its axioms and conclusions; not as an exercise in “neutralizing” such myths, but rather in an effort to expose and explore their rich semiotic associations. Thus what Derrida has been doing from Of Grammatology on is not comprehensible in any analysis which equates the two practices.

 

Furthermore, the “manner” of American deconstruction disseminated by Culler, de Man et al is a theory and practice in and of itself, with certain–though perhaps less certain than has been thought–connections to Derrida’s work. But it cannot be taken as an entirely accurate or fundamentally thorough translation of Derrida’s ideas. Thus any criticism of deconstruction as institutionalized by the early writers–and even many to follow–must be treated as criticism of their goals and methodologies, not Derrida’s.

 

This raises a question: Why hasn’t Derrida distanced himself and his work from these “incomplete” representations?

 

This is a question Nealon deals with in his essay. He points out that Derrida has always been unwilling to criticize–even in the smallest particular–any of his American “disseminators,” and that he has consistently displayed very little interest in “disciplining” the discourse surrounding his work.

 

Unless, that is, we can read the insistence in Cinders on reviewing “snapshot” expressions from his past works as an indirect form of protest; protest as restatement; restatement as remembrance. “Cinders are not nothing” (emphasis added). And the something that they are is an intersection of indebtedness to the past–“She, this cinder, was given or lent to him by so many others, through so much forgetting. . .” (41)–and promise for the future, “because each time it gives a different reading, another gift” (25). This hardly sounds like nihilism.

 

Perhaps Cinders is the first postmodern epistolary romance novel, written to (‘a’ accent grave) his love, Cinder, she–“Who is Cinder? Where is she? . . . someone vanished but something preserved her trace” (33)–complete with a Gothic preoccupation with the grave, the past, the thwarted romantic gesture. Perhaps there is even represented here an “anxiety of affluence,” a nervousness in the presence of so much meaning, an overabundance of meaning which can never be completely exhausted or entirely forgotten.

 

IV. Baptizing the Other Heading

 

Deconstruction’s burial is not only premature, it is also crowded; for the new right of the academy represent only a fraction of the new right in American society; a cultural faction whose attack rests, like Lehman’s, on the thuggish and irrational “logic” of guilt by association. The parties which are lumped together as “targets of opportunity” include deconstruction, the Humanities, universities, the MLA, feminism, multiculturalism, and, of course, “political correctness.”

 

For instance, their polysyllabic frontman George Will wrote recently in Newsweek that the Modern Language Association was a “more dangerous threat to the United States than the Butcher of Baghdad.” An editorial in the Chicago Tribune (October 1991) warned against the deadly and contagious affliction called “deconstruction, a French disease.” Another editorial, this one in the Wall Street Journal called upon all good Americans to beware “the fever swamps like the Modern Language Association . . . [where] Brigades of the politically correct” plot the downfall of Western Civilization. Syndicated columnist R. Emmett Tyrrell opines that the MLA stands for “intolerance and bigotry . . . [which] rides across campuses enforcing right thinking, thinking that is PC”.¹⁶

 

This widespread and virulently reactionary strike in the public and the academic press is expressive of deeply ingrained cultural resistance, even panic in the face of rising voices which were once faint or completely muted. And this cultural crisis–this crisis of cultures–is the context for Derrida’s first semi-explicit political writings collected in The Other Heading, a book which explores the paradox of examples.

 

The Other Heading includes an introduction (“For Example”) and two sections: the first from a paper Derrida delivered in Turin on May 20, 1990, at a conference entitled “European Cultural Identity,” and the second from a brief interview entitled “Call it a Day for Democracy.”

 

Here, Derrida is less interested in analyzing the “current” situation in Europe than analyzing the logic “of discourses that assume a certain relationship to the particular and the example” of “Europe and its historical others” (xi). This is meta-commentary, as always. However, though the larger concerns are the same, Derrida’s voice here is somewhat different: more relaxed, slightly less excruciatingly scholastic. But it is by no means political writing in the usual sense.

 

Derrida always writes in response to a prior text. In this case, that text is a collection of essays by Paul Valery, written for the League of Nations in the 1930s. Derrida begins were Valery began, speaking of the Europe of 1939 as a “Young Europe” which had been “constructed through a succession of exclusions, annexations, and exterminations.” And an odd sense of temporal displacement is further present as, when Derrida delivered this speech, the unification of Germany was only “in sight.” And yet everywhere is emphasized this very probability with his constant use of the qualifier “today”: “There is today the same feeling of imminence, of hope and danger, of anxiety” (63).

 

What Derrida seeks to begin here is an examination of the New European Subject; the post-colonial, post-cold war, post-unification, post-utopian, post-historical, post-modern subject; a subject immersed in demands for diversity, while still under tremendous pressure from the needs of cohesion.

 

Valery wrote his essays (Regards sur le monde actuel and Essais quasi politiques, among others) as a member of the Committee on Arts & Letters of the League of Nations, a committee whose ambitious charter called upon it to serve as a “permanent colloquium on ‘European cultural identity'” (xxxiv). Valery believed that the “best example” of a “site” of cohesive cultural identity was “that of the Mediterranean basin,” the “heart” of a New Europe which might serve as an “example” to the rest Europe, to the rest of the world.

 

Derrida sees in Valery’s use of this example all the trademarks of exemplary reasoning, as “the ‘example’ that it ‘offered’ [was] in fact unique, exemplary and incomparable” (xxv).

 

And here lies the rub. The word “example” is from the Latin, exemplum for “that which is taken out [emphasis added] of a larger quantity to show the character or quality of the rest.” An example is a “specimen,” something which is either “worthy of imitation” or that “serves as a warning.” An example is a “precedent,” a “prototype,” a “standard.”

 

But if the example is “taken out” of the context which forms it, is made to stand to one side, apart or above its companions, how, then, is it any longer an “example”? And if it is representative, how does it become “exemplary”?

 

The word which best captures the paradoxical logic of the example is, for Derrida, capital, in both the economic and political sense. Of course there is play here with cap (French for ‘head’) and capital, head and heading. But the relationships go much deeper than mere glyphic similarity. Such word play works to expose the substrata beneath centuries of assumptions which produce what we “mean” by a capital city, by the head of state, etc. “Europe has always recognized itself as a cape of headland . . . the point of departure for discovery, invention, and colonization, . . . or the very center, the Europe of the middle” (41).

 

For Valery–as for nearly everyone else who writes in favor of this or that “example” of cultural identity, an example which ought to serve as a “standard”–cultural identity becomes what Naas in his introduction calls “the metaphorization of literal goods and capital into the surplus value, the capital value, of spirit” (5). And Derrida argues that employing this metaphorization, capitalizing on the cultural example becomes “the very teleos of capital, the overcoming of the merely material in a spiritual surplus” (41).

 

To an American ear, the echoes of Puritanism are clearly audible in any argument of identity and “progress” which seeks the “overcoming of the merely material”; which sees as the highest good cultural investment which achieves “spiritual surplus.” And in fact what Valery argued was the best “example” for European cultural identity in 1939 sounds strikingly similar to what the critics of the MLA et al–what we might refer to as neo-Puritans–argue should be the best “example” for American cultural identity in the 1990s, and on into the 21st century.

 

While the “Other” heading–or as Derrida often insists on revising the phrase, the heading of the other–refers in Derrida’s speech to those “others” which have served as a colonial mirror to “central” Europe, to the Europe of Empires and Capitals, the “other” shore might just as well refer to the New World, facing the Old in temporal, geographic, and cultural descent/dependence/ independence. The similarity is more than merely situational, or even rhetorical–for the metaphor most often employed in the New Right’s attack on multiculturalism is this very idea of cultural capital.

 

As Stephen Greenblatt writes in “The MLA on Trial”: “The assault on the profession for betraying the classics is itself a betrayal of the classics. It is an attempt to make them over into dull, safe, and routine celebrations of order, an attempt, that is, to transform them into a certain kind of cultural capital: safe investment, locked away in a vault” (40).

 

Drawing on this idea of cultural identity as “invested capital,” Derrida warns that the constant danger of any assertion of a singular national identity is that it “presents itself, claims itself.” That is, merely by stating itself, it argues for its validity, its history, its “investment” in the capital of culture, and therefore its claim to future benefits. As Derrida warns, “it is the task of culture to impose the feeling of unity” in order to justify itself. And examples in their very assertion as examples — much as the assertion of cultural identity–imply a universality and are “linked to the value of exemplarity that inscribes the universal in the proper body of a singularity” (xxvi).

 

Ultimately, Derrida argues that, in any postmodern definition of identity (cultural or otherwise), we must become more adept at not only understanding but incorporating, providing for the other heading, the heading of the Other. “Derrida thus seeks a redefinition of European identity that includes respect for both universal values and difference” (xlvi). Cultural identity–like any of the other terms of identification Derrida has deconstructed–is shown to be a product of what it is not, of how it defines itself “against” or “as different than” its Other. And the moment of identity crisis is the moment of identity definition. “The ends and confines, the finitude of Europe, are beginning to emerge . . . when the capital of infinity and universality . . . finds itself encroached upon or in danger” (32).

 

But this is not a call for diversity “for its own sake.” In fact, the urge to “pop” diversity is –as any commodified and unopposed doctrine–its own worst enemy: self-negating, homogenizing. And this is, after all, the fear the forces of social conservatism invoke: that multiculturalism in fact seeks uniculturalism, a “homogeneity” which is in all contexts “politically correct.” Thus, ironically, the Right presents itself as arguing from the position of the underdog, the brave resistance, the Individual; from a position of Diversity. “Claiming to speak in the name of intelligibility, good sense, common sense, or the democratic ethic, this discourse tends, by means of these very things, and as if naturally, to discredit anything that complicates this model [of univocity]” (55).

 

Nowhere is this strategy clearer than in the discourse of “family values.” If we deconstruct the phrase in the economic context of cultural capital, we can see that a call to “family values” is in fact a prescription for the “value family.” And the value or “economy” family would be the one which required the least expenditure of cultural capital, which could be least expensively reproduced and circulated, which could become the “example” or “standard” family; one which made the fewest demands on our culture in terms of pluralism, of adjustment and experimentation; that would be the “best buy” family ideology.

 

The “family values” (or value family) debate raises what Derrida sees as the greatest new danger in the arena of cultural identity: the consensus.

 

Consensus is, after all, the political watchword of the 90s. “Consensus politics” summons up a vague image of agreements which are not compromises but rather somehow expressions of an “inner” unity, a “common” faith. But in fact Derrida warns against letting such “normative” code words disguise old cultural hegemony as new cultural identity; norms which create what he terms a “remote control,” the control being in the hands of whoever controls media networks; networks whose strength resides not in discovering and articulating cultural differences but rather in repressing and re-figuring differences to appear as “consumable” or “popular” opinions, consensus opinions.

 

The question “Today, what is public opinion?” begins the second section of the book. Derrida begins his answer by calling public opinion the “silhouette of a phantom.” That is, transitory, ephemeral (“lasting only one day”); a fluid and constructed “image” of what is supposedly a deep-rooted, widespread attitude; an attitude which nonetheless must be tested and re-constructed almost everyday to sound its strength, gauge its direction.

 

But where does one locate the “public”? In the past, the word indicated the dis-empowered, the voiceless, the segment of a culture which was anything but the head, which possessed anything but the capital. But “today,” the term grants legitimacy to the “decisions” of the invisible consensus. Invisible because, today, where is the boundary between public and private? What is not public? “The wandering of its proper body is also the ubiquity of a specter”; “one cites it, one makes it speak, ventriloquizes it” (87).

 

Derrida suggests that this phantom of “public opinion” requires some medium, for a phantom is that precisely because it lacks the “medium” by which to effect actual change in the physical world. The medium here is the daylight of the media: newspapers, TV, telephones: “the newspaper or daily produces the newness of this news as much as reports it” (89). And, Derrida argues, this phantom must always express itself through this medium as a “judgement,” a choice between two alternatives, a favoring of one side of a binarism over the other. Thus the “voice” of public opinion is reduced to a simple yea or nea, an affirmation of choices already made, programmed into it. “Everything that is not of the order of judgement, decision, and especially representation escapes both present-day democratic institutions and public opinions” (92).

 

Who rules this phantom is whoever best controls the discourse of these judgements, who decides what the binarism will exclude; an act Derrida calls the “new censorship,” a culturally hegemonic strategy “which combines concentration and fractionalization, accumulation and privatization. It de-politicizes” (100). Of course, the Right’s root axiom in America is that only the left speaks from “ideology,” i.e. dogmatism. And the appeal of this attack on “political correctness” is nostalgic: it purports to recall a time when the “correct” mode of the university and the workplace was apolitical, a time before politics “contaminated” the private and commercial spheres.

 

However, there is, not surprisingly, another problem (or paradox) here. For Derrida also warns against dispersion, against cultivating “minority differences, untranslatable idiolects, national antagonisms” just “for their own sake.” A reasonable question is then: Who is to tell the difference? The difference, that is, between legitimate claims of minorities, idiolects, etc., and those exercises of diversity which are “for their own sake”?

 

Derrida’s prescription is that “One must therefore try to invent gestures, discourses, politico-institutional practices that inscribe the alliance of these two imperatives, of these two promises or contracts: the capital and . . . the other of the capital.” For Europe, this means “welcoming foreigners in order not only to integrate them but to recognize and accept their alterity,” as well as “criticizing . . . a totalitarian dogmatism that, under the pretense of putting an end to capital, destroyed democracy and the European heritage” (45).

 

What the entire essay finally works toward is the “impossible” way between (or beyond or aside from) “monopoly [and] dispersion.” Which requires us first of all to think of cultural identity as something other than cultural capital, as a past investment which must gain and never lose interest, which can never be “wasted” on “expensive” experiments with alternative social structures, such as, for instance, non-traditional families. Those acquainted with Derrida’s other writings will find this call for an “impossible” ethics familiar. Derrida argues that the possible alternatives are always those “programmatic extensions” of policies already in place; that decisions which choose from among the possible alternatives are decisions already made, long before: “politics, and responsibility, if there are any, will only ever have begun with the experience and experiment of aporia”; “The condition or possibility of this thing called responsibility is a certain experience and experiment of the possibility of the impossible: the testing of the aporia from which one may invent the only possible invention, the impossible invention” (41).

 

Such a new conception of identity–again, cultural or otherwise–will not be easy to either articulate or disseminate; not in Europe, certainly not in America. Binarism is so deeply embedded in Western thought, in Indo-European language, that perhaps it is only surprising that we can see through such thinking at all, even momentarily.

 

But if not conformity, and not chaos, then what? East Germany, Yugoslavia, MacDonald franchises, EuroDisney, the umpteenth Far Flung Shore where cowed natives greet American monster truck rallies called Operation Just Do It with the sincere smiles of future entrepreneurs . . . all these “examples” would seem to provide very little optimism for a successful “impossible” invention of this new cultural identity, an identity which inherently asserts not only its own heading but also that of its other.

 

How to acknowledge the past, yet transcend it? How to provide examples, yet avoid dominance?

 

At the end of Poe’s “The Premature Burial,” the narrator counsels the reader against devoting any worry at all to the buried-if-not-dead, the gone-if-not-forgotten, advising us to let the memorialized be forgotten, to let sleeping ” sepulchral terrors” lie, and worry not whether their sleep is eternal or restless: “–they must be suffered to slumber, or we perish” (268).

 

Clearly Derrida disagrees. Only by being constantly aware of but not in thrall to the past are we aware of the “restless” cinders encrypted in each and every word we use, and can realize the paradoxes of the language (and logic) of exemplarity which expresses and thus molds the way we conceive of our problems, and thus the way we construct our solutions. In Cinders and The Other Heading, Derrida offers compelling evidence that, whatever the result of the urge toward memorialization currently underway in the American academy, Derridean deconstruction is alive and well and quite up to the challenges of the new century.

 

Notes

 

1. “The Premature Burial,” in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, New York: The Modern Library, 1938.

 

2. New York Review of Books #13, 1992.

 

3. “Deconstruction After the Fall”, AWP Chronicle, Vol 25 #3, 1992.

 

4. While fully 95 titles dealing with deconstruction are listed in the relatively under-stocked Johns Hopkins library, perhaps half of the latest include the word “after” or “anti” or “against” in their titles. As for the public press: “deconstruction” appeared recently in The Atlantic Monthly, Chicago magazine, and in a Newsweek article on architect Philip Johnson. It’s even the name of a record label.

 

5. “The Discipline of Deconstruction,” PMLA, October, 1992, Vol 107 #5, 1266-1279.

 

6. The latest in burial technology were coffins with alarm bells on top that might be rung by a reawakened victim tugging on a cord which dangled inside.

 

7. “Paradox” rather than “problem,” as calling something a “problem” automatically implies that one is seeking a solution; a way to repair the problem, some teleological methodology which can be demonstrated to rectify the flaw discovered, and which can then be stored, like a tool, for future use.

 

8. Literally “fire the cinder.”

 

9. There are many critics of deconstruction and Derridean analysis whose methods are rigorously scholastic and whose results are rhetorically insightful; critics who have engaged the “political unconscious” at work in the patterns and focuses of Derrida’s own readings, and who have gone on to develop quite distinct “deconstructive” readings, particularly in the areas of feminist and post-colonial literary theory.

 

10. As Nealon points out, for the real culprits of this particular misreading we must exhume the first American presentations of Derrida’s work: Culler’s On Deconstruction, Norris’s Deconstruction: Theory and Practice, and Deconstruction and Criticism (which included work by Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and Hillis Miller); works which established a deconstructive tradition Nealon criticizes as “commodified . . . simplified and watered down” (1269).

 

11. For instance, in Displacement: Derrida and After (Indiana University Press, 1983), a collection of essays on the whole supportive of deconstruction, we are told by Mark Krupnick in the introduction that the term displacement “is not theoretically articulated in Derrida’s writing” (1). But far worse than this, Krupnick’s grasp of Derrida’s “neutralization” of the logic of metaphysical dichotomies is so weak that he then goes on to write of a “new (post-Hegelian) dispensation, in the reign of difference (as opposed to identity),” showing himself still completely in thrall to that very (il)logic. Krupnick’s introduction is all too typical of the misreading of and outright deafness to Derrida’s early writings.

 

12. See for instance “Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of ‘Postmodernism’,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott, eds., New York: Routledge, 1992.

 

13. It is the very idea of what we mean by this “presence” that Derrida wishes to reverse and displace–but not neutralize: “We thus come to posit presence . . . no longer as the absolute matrix form of being but rather as a ‘particularization’ and ‘effect'” Marges, 17).

 

14. Of course, the true representation of this dynamic would include many more than just two forces.

 

15. We see this distinction in Derrida’s definition of differance: “a structure and a movement that cannot be conceived on the basis of the opposition presence/absence. Differance is the systematic play of differences, or traces of differences, of the spacing by which elements relate to one another” Positions, 39).

 

16. Quoted in “The MLA on Trial” by Stephen Greenblatt, Profession 92, 39-41.