File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_1997/bhaskar.9710, message 120


From: "Wallace Polsom" <wallace-AT-raggedclaws.com>
To: <bhaskar-AT-jefferson.village.virginia.edu>
Subject: BHA: Re: Help
Date: Tue, 21 Oct 1997 12:40:28 -0600


Colin writes:

<snip>

However, my problem is the following sentence, and I was just wondering if
the collective wisdom of the list could enlighten me. The author writes:

"Specifically, I interrogate the following - (1) the issues of practice,
discourse and contexts of meaning that are implicit in existing solutions,
offering a radical, decentered understanding of practices in place of the
restricted/conservative understanding found in the agent-structure
literature..."

Now, there are all sorts of problems with this claim, not least the claim to
be offering a _radical_ understanding, where as the poor simple minded fools
who have gone before are all dreadfully conservative. However, this is not
my problem, such moralising claiming of the high ground is endemic to pomo
in my discipline (they call themselves dissidents, invoking, of course,
images of the Gulags etc.). My real problem is I can make no sense at all of
what a _decentered understanding_ might be. What can this mean, or is
decentred simply a pomo catchword that is being thrown about here at random?
What is a centred understanding for that matter. Help! Am I missing
something here?

++++++++++

Wallace writes:

To a great extent, the writer quoted in Colin's message _is_ simply
parroting fashionable theoretical formulations that allow one to stage a
revolt without actually having to suffer through a revolution. More
specifically (and seriously), I suspect the claim to present a "radical,
decentered understanding of practices" could be traced back to Derrida's
"Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences," a short
paper that was first delivered as a lecture in 1966 and that appears in
revised form in Derrida's "classic" collection _Writing and Difference_
(1978). Here's the opening few paragraphs:

++++++++++

Derrida writes:

Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure
that could be called an "event," if this loaded word did not entail a
meaning which it is precisely the function of structural--or
structuralist--thought to reduce or to suspect. Let us speak of an "event,"
nevertheless, and let us use quotation marks to serve as a precaution. What
would this event be then? Its exterior form would be that of a _rupture_ and
a redoubling.

It would be easy enough to show that the concept of structure and even the
word "structure" itself are as old as the _episteme_--that is to say, as old
as Western science and Western philosophy--and that their roots thrust deep
into the soil of ordinary language, into whose deepest recesses the
_episteme_ plunges in order to gather them up and to make them part of
itself in a metaphorical displacement. Nevertheless, up to the event which I
wish to mark out and define, structure--or rather the structurality of
structure--although it has always been at work, has always been neutralized
or reduced, and this by a process of giving it a center or of referring to a
point of presence, a fixed origin. The function of this center was not only
to orient, balance, and organize the structure--one cannot in fact conceive
of an unorganized structure--but above all to make sure that the
organizational principle of the structure would limit what we might call the
_play_ of the structure. By orienting and organizing the coherence of the
system, the center of a structure permits the play of its elements inside
the total form. And even today the notion of a structure lacking any center
represents the unthinkable itself.

++++++++++

Wallace concludes:

I am not quoting this material in order to defend it. But even at this early
stage of the essay, I think you can see how Derrida's ideas might fit in
with the quotation you provided, Colin, especially with the author's special
focus on "agent-structure literature." The "understanding of practices" is
"radical" because it supposedly loosens the "roots" of various
practice-enabling structures, revealing every starting point as, in a
certain sense, arbitrary (simply, one could have begun somewhere else,
and--empirically speaking--many have). Derrida's article is interesting
because he does not, as I read it, "force" the reader to make a "choice"
between "structure" and "play." (Love those "scare quotes"!) That is,
Derrida allows that starting points are not _just_ arbitrary but are also
necessary--otherwise, no structures, knowledge, etc. (Elsewhere, Derrida is
more emphatic, noting that the "formalist project"--I believe that was the
phrase he used, but it has been a while since I read much of Derrida's
stuff--must continue.) Your author, on the other hand, seems to have a much
higher horse she wants to get up on.

Now, I don't know if this helps, but it is difficult to tell what the author
you quoted is really on about without more context. With luck, my post will
at least prompt others who are more knowledgeable than I am to jump in and
try to help you out.

And who knows, your opponent may not even be aware of the "roots" of her own
analysis. Wouldn't surprise me.




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