Narrative after Deconstruction

Chapter Eight Narrative and Post-Constructive Ethics

153 Ethics after Deconstruction One of the nagging issues in contemporary literary and cultural criticism after deconstruction is how the ubiquity of discourse that structuralism and poststructuralism describe affects our understanding of other people. Contemporary literary theory has been dominated largely by a model of social identity perhaps most clearly embodied in Michel Foucault’s early to middle period, where social institutions and discourse construct an episteme that seems to interpellate individuals in a suffocatingly totalizing way. When Foucault defines his “archaeological ” method as the analysis of savoir, “that is, in a domain in which the subject is necessarily situated and dependent, and can never figure as titular” (Archaeology 183) he explains how individuals are “placed” through discourse. Contemporary theorists have felt that they need either to accept this model of social identity fully or to reject it out of hand in favor of a more traditional understanding of identity and social space. Thus, John McGowan surveys poststructuralism and concludes with a call for a very traditional understanding of a subject’s place within social space: “[w]hat we need instead [of poststructuralism] is an account of the self’s inevitable immersion in the social that also explains how selves can experience themselves as integral agents capable of dissenting from or choosing alternative paths among the options social situations present” (211). This study has developed a theory of textual objects in a post-deconstructive context that refuses to grant them either simple extra-textual existence or complete linguistic construction . Would it be possible to take these conclusions about postchapter eight NARRATIVE AND POST-DECONSTRUCTIVE ETHICS . deconstructive textuality and apply them to ethics? I have, of course, no intention of beginning this discussion from ethical theory in general —which would be well beyond the scope of a concluding chapter of this sort. Instead, I would like to describe specifically how the understanding of textuality developed in this study might offer the grounds for responding to the ethical problems raised by deconstruction. If deconstruction has undermined traditional definitions of ethical action by suggesting that such ethics and our interaction with others is always already subject to textual instabilities, might not post-deconstructive theories of textuality offer a new way to think about the relation between ethics and representation? The problems of ethics in a post-deconstructive context are clear in Alan Dunn’s critique of Jean-François Lyotard, which was discussed briefly in chapter 1. Lyotard, it will be recalled, claims that ethics can be formulated in a more open-ended way through the notion of the “differend .” “The differend,” writes Lyotard, “is the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be. . . . The state is signaled by what one ordinarily calls a feeling: ‘one cannot find the words,’ etc.” (Differend 13). Lyotard claims that we must attend to such feelings and search for the moments at which aporia within argumentation make us aware of how justice and legal discourse are constructed. This claim that we should attend to “feelings” has come under fire from a number of sources,1 but Dunn articulates the problems with this claim particularly clearly: [T]he differend’s very immunity from the language of adjudication threatens to reduce it to mere tautology, to a programmatic discontent with systems simply because they are systems. According to the logic of the differend, there is no way of analyzing the evils of hegemony, of explaining why notions of a cognitive totality must necessarily be harmful, nor can we learn anything about the differend from its historical contexts, since the differend is produced by a pure contingency that is devoid of cause or historical determination. . . . Most generally, Lyotard fails to reconcile his insistence that the differend is the product of a purely linguistic incommensurability that cannot be referred to any prior structures of consciousness or intention with his claim that the differend is shaped by struggle, frustration, and suffering. (197) Dunn implies that any deconstructive belief that all knowledge is contingent will be at odds with the ethical recognition of suffering and struggle. Although Dunn’s critique is valid and insightful, the criteria that he establishes for what we might call a “poststructuralist ethics” are too stringent. Indeed, one might partially defend Lyotard by sug154 . Narrative after Deconstruction gesting that Dunn’s critique is based merely upon the reassertion of the very legal discourse that Lyotard...