DECONSTRUCTION AND LITERATURE

Deconstructionism, as applied to literary criticism, is a paradox about a paradox: It assumes that all discourse, even all historical narrative, is essentially
disguised self-revelatory messages. Being subjective, the text has no fixed meaning, so when we read, we are prone to misread. Deconstructionism
emerged from Paris and, notwithstanding its claim to universality, has an evident history. It is a manifestation of existential anxieties about presence and
absence, reality and appearance. It developed via structuralism, with its emphasis on semantics and symbolism.

From these sources it derived its fundamental premise: the endless slippage of the subject, the futility of any attempt to name reality. The premise suggests
the disillusion attendant on the collapse of the two major forces in twentieth-century European thought: enlightened humanism and idealistic Marxism.
Despite its origins, deconstructionism found its own best home in the United States, that historically dissociated construction of random meanings.
(“America is deconstruction,” said its leading proponent, Jacques Derrida.)

By the 1970s, deconstruction filled—perhaps better, emptied—the gap left in the humanities in the U.S. by the demise of the old “new criticism.” But what
began as brilliant and creative analytic performances soon became classroom pedagogy. Throughout the decade, the seminar rooms on U.S. campuses—
and then campuses worldwide—became workshops in deconstructionist practice. Junior misreaders worked away, becoming ever more like C.I.A.
operatives, decoding false signals sent by a distant enemy, the writer.

Deconstruction exalted itself with ever higher pretensions. As one academic critic exulted, “The history of literature is part of the history of criticism.”
Deconstruction transformed everything into social commentary, easily making affinities with sexual and racial politics, two other militant philosophies that
challenge the sanctity of text. It presented itself as a supra-ideological mode of analysis, exposing the ideological aberrations of others while seemingly
possessing none itself.

Any resistance that deconstructionists encountered was usually interpreted as censorious ignorance. As their approach prevailed, gangs of
neodeconstructionists descended on the library with their critical services. One would demythologize, another decanonize, another dephallicize, another
dehegemonize, another defame. Literature, as the deconstructionists frequently proved, had been written by entirely the wrong people for entirely the
wrong reasons. Soon all that would be left of it would be a few bare bones of undecidable discourse and some tattered leather bindings. This frenzy would
be called a conference of the Modern Language Association.

The point that needs to be reaffirmed is that writing is an existential act, an imaginative exploration of ideas. It is, in fact, an expression of moral
responsibility. Literature is not a subordinate category of social criticism. When writers are censored, imprisoned, killed, or threatened with death for their
writings, it is not because their discourse is undecidable. If we are to take authors and their fate seriously, we must recognize that fiction is more than an
opportunity for word games; we must honor it as a mode of radical discovery.

We need an ambiance around writing that affirms its nature as creativity, as art, and that in a larger sense considers creativity a prime power in the making
of intelligence, feeling, and morality. This was the position from which Jean-Paul Sartre with his freedom-affirming existentialism started the postwar
debate of which deconstruction is a latter-day development. He started it because during the 1930s the word had been defamed and disfigured, the book
burned, the writer erased, by forces that lay outside criticism, in history.

LIVING IN A RATIONAL SOCIETY

The rationalizing of society can be conceptualized as the pursuit of efficiency, predictability, calculability, and control through technology. But rational
systems inevitably spawn a series of irrationalities that result in the compromising and perhaps even the undermining of their rationality.

Fast-food restaurants, which epitomize the rational model, proffer the fastest means of getting from a hungry state to a sated one, without surprises, at low
cost, in a carnival-like setting suggesting that fun awaits the consumer at each visit. The wholesomeness of the food seems an insignificant consideration.
Whereas in the past, working people were prepared to spend up to an hour preparing dinner, they now are impatient if a meal is not on the table within ten
minutes. (For their part, some fast-food restaurants have developed chairs that become uncomfortable after about twenty minutes, to ensure that diners do
not stay long.)

Fast-food restaurants have preferentially recruited adolescent help, at least until recently, because this age group adjusts more easily than adults do to
surrendering their autonomy to machines, rules, and procedures. Few skills are required on the job, so workers are asked to use only a minute portion of
their abilities. This policy is irrational from the standpoint of the organization, since it could obtain much more from its employees for the money (however
negligible) it pays them. These minimal skill demands are also irrational from the perspective of the employees, who are not allowed to think or to respond
creatively to the demands of the work.

These restrictions lead to high levels of resentment, job dissatisfaction, alienation, absenteeism, and turnover among workers in fast-food franchises. In
fact, these businesses have the highest turnover rate of any industry in the U.S. The entire workforce of the fast-food industry turns over three times in a
year. Although the simple, repetitive nature of the work makes it easy to replace those who leave, the organization would clearly benefit from keeping
employees longer. The costs of hiring and training are magnified when the turnover rate is extraordinarily high.
The application of the rational model to the house-building process in the 1950s and ’60s led to suburban communities consisting of nearly identical
structures. Indeed, it was possible to wander into the residence of someone else and not to realize immediately that one was not at home. The more
expensive developments were superficially more diversified, but their interior layouts assumed residents who were indistinguishable in their requirements.

Furthermore, the planned communities themselves look very similar. Established trees are bulldozed to facilitate construction. In their place, a number of
saplings, held up by posts and wire, are planted. Streets are laid out in symmetrical grid patterns. With such uniformity, suburbanites may well enter the
wrong subdivision or become lost in their own.

Many of Steven Spielberg’s films are set in such suburbs. Spielberg’s strategy is to lure the viewer into this highly repetitive world and then to have a
completely unexpected event occur. For example, the film Poltergeist takes place in a conventional suburban household in which evil spirits ultimately
disrupt the sameness. (The spirits first manifest themselves through another key element of the homogeneous society—the television set.) The great success
of Spielberg’s films may be traceable to a longing for some unpredictability, even if it is bizarre and menacing, in increasingly routinized live

WHAT SEPERATES SCIENCE FROM ART?

I believe the best understanding of the difference between science and art in the nineteenth century is to be found in a man who was not an artist but a
rationalist. Scientist and writer Thomas Henry Huxley argued that the intellectual content of art is altogether different from the intellectual content of
science. In art it is truth to nature. But this truth is relative for it depends entirely upon the intellectual culture of the person to whom art is addressed. No
man ever understands Shakespeare until he is old, though the youngest may admire him, the reason being that he satisfies the artistic instinct of the
youngest and harmonizes with the ripest and richest experiences of the oldest. In science, intellectual content is truth to fact and the deductions and
generalizations which can be made from facts.

The pleasures, however, that one receives from either art or science, Huxley said, have a common source. These pleasures arise from the satisfaction one
receives in tracing the central theme of whatever he is interested in at the moment in all its endless variations as it appears and reappears to demonstrate the
truth of unity in variety. Whether it be a problem in mathematics, an experiment in morphology, a chess game, a primitive drawing, a sophisticated
painting, a simple ballad, a complex poem, a homely refrain, or a fugue by Bach, the process of comprehending the symbols used to express the idea is
both intellectual and esthetic. The process is intellectual because it is the intellect which comprehends the laws governing any particular science or art; and
it is esthetic because it is the feelings which determine the amount of emotional pleasure one can derive from them. But the ends of the two are different.
Science has as its end the attainment of truth. Art has for its end the attainment of pleasure. “The subjects of all knowledge are divisible into the two
groups,” said Huxley, “matters of science and matters of art; for all things with which the reasoning faculty alone is occupied, come under the province of
science. And in the broadest sense, and not in the narrow and technical sense in which we are now accustomed to use the word art, all things feelable, all
things which stir our emotions, come under the term of art.”

I believe science is slowly destroying art. It can be said that science has created a hard, materialistic philosophy of life. If it destroyed art only, that would
not be so bad; but science also destroys the highest aspirations of the human soul. Love is reduced to a biologic law; family relationships are explained by
psychology; ideals are resolved into the yearnings of frustration; and God is metamorphosed into a tribal deity. Once the veil of mystery that enshrouds
these great primary instincts of the human soul is ruthlessly snatched away, life loses the qualities which have made it beautiful and significant in the past.
Despair takes the place of hope; resignation takes the place of resolution; sex takes the place of love; atheism takes the place of religion. Wise and
intelligent men become cynics and common men become hedonists. Duty and morality are forgotten in the mad struggle to forget a life thus deprived of the
ideals which before had made it endurable. To eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge can be as disastrous today as it was ages ago in the Garden of Eden.