Coming to an Understanding of Understanding: Deconstruction, Ordinary Language Philosophy and Contemporary Critical Theory

COMING TO AN UNDERSTANDING OF UNDERSTANDING /Reed Way Dasenbrock Deconstruction, Ordinary Language Philosophy and Contemporary Critical Theory AFEW YEARS ago philosophy was widely perceived (by non-philosophers , of course) as having become an irredeemably irrelevant intellectual enterprise. No longer a discipline with any semblance of unity, philosophy was conceived of quite differently in English-speaking countries and on the continent. The existence of this split led to the circulation of rather unflattering pictures of each philosophical tradition: on the one hand, Anglo-American philosophy was caricatured as a minute inquiry into grammatical subtleties that no one without such an analytical training can see the point of; on the other hand, Continental philosophy was caricatured as an ineffable and incomprehensible search to say what cannot be said. The analytical tradition produced trivial clarity; the Continental tradition produced profound nonsense. However, over the last decade, philosophy has occupied an increasingly larger place in our intellectual horizon. In particular, philosophy is now seen as of immediate relevance to our understanding of literature and to the theory and practice of literary criticism. Both traditions of philosophy, in varying degrees, have contributed to this growth in our philosophical awareness. French Structuralism and its complicated progeny, without a doubt the single most important recent influence on our changing views of literature, clearly owes a considerable debt to Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger, as well as Saussure, Marx and Freud. The most famous of that progeny, deconstruction, exemplifies this debt most clearly, as its maître d'école, Jacques Derrida, is a French philosopher working in the Continental tradition. The English tradition, though less prominent, has helped inspire speech act theory and reader-response criticism. Analytically trained philosophers such as Donald Davidson, Stanley Cavell, and Richard Rorty are increasingly being cited in recent critical theory. Inevitably, or at least quite logically, as these philosophical traditions have come into play in literary theory, in their wake have come attempts to bridge the gap between them. Some of these attempts have come from prominent figures in the Anglo-American tradition, such as Cavell and Rorty. The thrust of much of their recent work has been to argue that the split between the two philosophical traditions is essentially a false one. In Philosophy and the Mirror ofNature (1979), 234 · The Missouri Review Rorty explicitly argued that the criticisms of traditional philosophy offered by Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger were in substantial agreement; in his more recent collection of essays, Consequences of Pragmatism (1982), he extends this to present Derrida and Wittgenstein as comparable non-Kantian philosophers. Stanley Fish, the literary critic who has probably done the most in applying the AngloAmerican tradition of philosophy to current issues in critical theory, has also joined the chorus claiming that there is no essential division between the two traditions. In a recent essay, "With the Compliments of the Author: Reflections on Austin and Derrida" {Critical Inquiry, Summer 1982), he analyzes the most celebrated confrontation between the two traditions, the controversy between Jacques Derrida and John Searle over the work of JX. Austin which was published in Glyph 1 + 2 (1977). In sharp contrast to Searle (and to Derrida), Fish presents Austin and Derrida as figures in fundamental agreement. In Fish's account, there is not even a gap to bridge: we don't need detente, because there never was a cold war. But détente is a process involving two parties and so far all the peace overtures have come from the English-speaking world. The portrait one would get of Anglo-American linguistic philosophy from the writings of French critical theorists and their followers in this country would be very odd indeed. The only figure of whom any account is taken is JX. Austin, whose notion of locutionary and illocutionary forces has been the subject of repeated attacks by Derrida, Paul de Man, Barbara Johnson, and others. There have been so many of these that one is inclined to ask, if Austin is as fundamentally mistaken as they claim him to be, why does he need to be attacked so often? (Of course, one could ask the same question about Derrida, of which more later.) Wittgenstein, in contrast, has to my knowledge never...