Joel Jacobsen

One of the fascinating things about popular culture is its ability to absorb the avant-garde.  The Jackson Pollock drip school of abstract impressionism - what Harold Rosenburg (or was it Clement Greenberg?) called action painting, apparently after the Pop-Art original  - went from the shock of the new to a comfortable style of office decor within a single generation.  (It also gave us a fun website.) 

It took even less time for the shock-the-bourgeois theater scene to be overtaken by Hollywood's teen-comedy factory.  You want Verfremdungseffekt?  Check out the Scary Movie franchise.

But what happens when the popular culture overtakes the avant garde, but doesn't commodify it?  When, instead, techniques of the avant garde are adopted for utilitarian reasons?

Consider Paul de Man, the Belgian Nazi.  He was an enthusiastic quisling who wrote essays for two Nazi newspapers during the occupation.  A little bit of what his collaboration meant in moral terms is conveyed by this link.  De Man was interested in power: "the current of history ... continues to flow without bothering about the reticence of a few individuals who persist in not understanding its power."  Fascists such as himself, he boasted, were "the precursors of a unanimous will."  Here's an illustration of what he meant by "unanimous will."

In a notorious essay entitled "The Jews in Contemporary Literature" (Le Soir, March 4, 1941), de Man wrote that "Western intellectuals" - a category that, by his definition, excluded Jewish Europeans - should be proud that they had "safeguard[ed] themselves from Jewish influence in a domain as culturally representative as literature ...  We could not have much hope for the future of our civilization if it had let itself be invaded, without resistance, by a foreign force."

De Man concluded the essay by saying, with comfortable complacence, that "a solution to the Jewish problem that would lead to the creation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe would not have, for the literary life of the West, regrettable consequences.  It would lose, in all, some personalities of mediocre worth".

(These quotes are from David Lehman's great book, Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man, which is hostile to de Man but, so far as I know, has never been accused of inaccuracy.)

De Man was a trivial Nazi, and his triviality allowed him to escape punishment after the war.  He slunk off to America and was soon talking rather vaguely about himself as one who had "come from the left and from the happy days of the Front populaire" - the anti-fascists.  He got a job teaching at Bard College, where he married one of his students without first divorcing his Belgian wife, only to get fired for lying, cheating and stealing, according to the department head who hired (and fired) him. 

So, naturally, he was hired at Yale.  At Yale he enacted the Furherprinzip by getting himself adored as the great oracle of a new intellectual discipline, deconstructionism.  After all, what better place for a trivial fascist satrap than the rigid hierarchy of an elite university? 

When I first became aware of deconstructionism, I figured it was just the pathetic twitchings of a discipline that had lost most of its sense of purpose.  Why, after all, should anyone be an English major?  Speaking as one, I can say: To read a lot of really great books while you still have time.  In something of the same vein, the novelist Paul Auster writes in the current Guardian that literature is "utterly and magnificently ... useless" (the ellipsis is his) - a piece that, perhaps by coincidence, appears side-by-side with a particularly vicious "Digested Read" parody of his most recent novel.

Reading was the only good reason I ever came up with for being an English major during my four years, and it's not one that goes very far toward justifying "English" as an academic discipline.  Deconstructionism, I figured, was a way of occupying all those tuition-paying, class-teaching graduate students with something that, from a distance, could be mistaken for scholarship.  Since no one actually read the papers the deconstructionists produced (look at this table of contents - which of the authors has achieved the purest alloy of pretension and tedium?), its emptiness could be kept a trade secret.

Deconstructionists like to depict themselves as intellectuals performing work of great philosophical subtlety, but their only observable achievement is to have secured the tenure of a number of people in a very insecure profession - no mean accomplishment, to be sure, but arguably less than a philosophical breakthrough. 

But after 15 years in the criminal justice system, I've gradually become convinced that there's more to deconstructionism.  Look at the following list of personality characteristics - how many did the minor Nazi / major Yale poohbah de Man possess?

sense of entitlement, unremorseful, apathetic to others, unconscionable, blameful of others, manipulative and conning, affectively cold, disparate understanding of behavior and socially acceptable behavior, disregardful of social obligations, nonconforming to social norms, irresponsible.

People with these characteristics also frequently exhibit superficial glibness - a smooth flow of words that, upon reflection, actually mean almost nothing.  That, I think, is a pretty good description of this list of de Man quotes.  What I'm saying is this: de Man's version of deconstructionism replicated the thought processes of the sociopath.

De Man himself said that "[a] deconstruction always has for its target to reveal the existence of hidden articulations and fragmentations within assumed monadic totalities."  His one-time acolyte Barbara Johnson, reputedly responsible for "re-readings of motherhood as a nearly untenable discursive position" (though I think, out of charity, we should give her the benefit of the doubt on that one), explains that "[a] deconstructive reading is an attempt to show how the conspicuously foregrounded statements in a text are systematically related to discordant signifying elements that the text has thrown into its shadows or margins."  (Highly athletic texts, those.) 

This is more than meaningless blather.  It's meaningful blather.  Jonathan Culler, an enthusiast who (rather oddly) retains the ability to write a coherent clause, tells us that "[t]o deconstruct a discourse is to show how it undermines the philosophy it asserts".  It "undermines the philosophy" by showing that the "discourse" or "text" really means something other than what the author intended. 

Meaning, or rather "meaning", is brought to the text by the reader rather than the author, which logically means that the "meaning" of the deconstructive reading is likewise the creative effort of the reader, and so on.  It doesn't take long before you're following the trajectory traced by Frank in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In the deconstructivist universe, the reader - which is to say, the English professor - is the senior partner, and the text a screen upon which to project the professor's preoccupations.  That is, I think, actually a fair critique of much that has passed for criticism since "English" was first accepted as an academic discipline.  But attempting to implement a criticism, no matter how insightful, as a technique for positive analysis has its difficulties.

If the "meaning" of a text is brought to it by the reader, then that meaning is limited by the reader's imagination.  And how many people (not including those currently employed by an English department) believe that English professors, on average, have more lively imaginations than novelists?  That's why deconstructionist readings all sound the same.  The text changes, but the sort of things English professors get rewarded for saying remain the same.

It's easy to see that deconstructionism involves a big dose of envy by the failed writers who populate English departments - they can simply say they're more creative than novelists, without having to prove it. 

It also offers a way for English departments to sell their continued funding as an integral part of the university's scholarly mission.  The more obscure the theory, the more impervious to criticism, after all - and the first line of defense for deconstructionists is always to say that their discipline involves such profundities that anyone who criticizes it reveals his or her own intellectual shortcomings. "If you are stupid enough to judge [a Nazi like de Man on the basis of his Nazism]," wrote Andrzej Warminski, "you judge at your peril, for that judgment ... judges only you."  (The ellipsis is Lehman's - I can't find the original on the net.)

In Paul de Man's case, it's also easy to say that his devotion to deconstructionism was a way to evade responsibility for his Nazi past.  But I'm not sure that's true, because it assumes he possessed a conscience, and that he was bothered by it.  I haven't seen any evidence of either.  He suffered fear of exposure, of course, but it seems a bit much to conclude his entire career was a preemptive move against exposure.   I believe de Man's fundamental slipperiness and dishonesty were, in fact, genuine expressions of his personality, that is, the personality of a psychopath. 

If that seems too much, consider again what it meant that de Man, in the midst of massive deportations and executions of the Jews of his own country, advocated sending all Jews - not excluding his fellow literati - to a "colony isolated from Europe." If you opened up your paper's Sunday book review and found a calm, literate essay advocating the round-up and mass deportation of writers the reviewer considers mediocrities, what would you think about the reviewer?   Then consider that de Man almost certainly understood that "deportation" meant, at best, concentration camps, and consider again de Man's bigamy and his post-war history of lie after lie.  I don't think "psychopath" is too strong.

When de Man's Nazism was first publicized, his admirers actually - no joke - tried to "prove" that writing pro-Nazi articles for a Nazi newspapers during the Nazi occupation of one's homeland was a way to "subvert" the Nazi regime.

And by now the relevance of this post to the practices of contemporary judges should be becoming clear.   The following is, in my opinion, the premier feat of deconstructionism performed by a judge - and note, too, that it actually predates de Man's work of the 1970s.  (So which way did the influence run?)

(The one preliminary thing you need to know is that, as the Supreme Court has put it, "The word 'shall' is ordinarily 'The language of command'."  When it appears in a statute, it "creates an obligation impervious to judicial discretion".  Almost all statutes use either "shall" or "may.") 

My example of statutory (de)construction involves the following words used by Congress: "An application for a writ of habeas corpus in behalf of a person in custody pursuant to the judgment of a State court shall not be granted unless it appears that the applicant has exhausted the remedies available in the courts of the State".

In a brilliant deconstruction, the Supreme Court in 1963 proved that the word "shall" as used in that statute actually meant "may."   Its logic, or perhaps one should say its rhetorical strategy, was as follows: (1) the Court itself had originally formulated the legal doctrine addressed by the statute, and because  courts cannot define their own jurisdiction, the doctrine was not jurisdictional; (2) when Congress, which does have the power to define the courts' jurisdiction, enacted a statute codifying the doctrine, it must necessarily have intended to codify it in the original formulation adopted by the Supreme Court; (3) therefore, the real meaning of "shall" was "may."

What's particularly inspiring about this deconstruction is that no one -  but no one - would defend it straight out.  Certainly the Supreme Court itself, and the many thousands of federal court decisions relying on it, have never said "When Congress used 'shall', it meant 'may.'"  But the Court's brilliant 1963 deconstruction of the statute - a deconstruction that has survived congressional revision of the statute - proves that by bringing your own meaning to the reading of even the clearest text, you can make it mean whatever is most personally satisfying to you.