A Very Unfunny Entry About My Intellectual Shortcomings, or The Five Year Rule

So I've spent some time thinking about Derrida this weekend in order to generate an intelligent response to Matt over on Long Sunday, but I must admit to being severely out of my league. 

What amazes me is how thoroughly I've forgotten everything I ever learned about Derrida and deconstruction.  I'm flipping through my copies of Writing and Difference, Glas, The Gift of Death, &c. and staring incomprehensibly at my incomprehensible notes.  I'm reading over the essay I wrote for J. Hillis Miller on The Gift of Death--by which I mean I'm dumbly observing the words tumbling over the pages but not understanding them at all--and it dawns on me that I may've conned my way through the first couple of years of graduate school. 

I sincerely belive that Hillis' comments on this essay are the product of his genius, i.e. utterly unrelated to the reality of the essay he graded.  Which is only to say, qua Matt, that the word "deconstruction" ought not only be banned from undergraduate classroom, but graduate seminars too.

In other words, what happened to that eager incoming graduate student who, knowing he'd attend Derrida's seminar in the Spring, spent hours reading every book and article the Man had ever written?  I remember sitting before the shelves of the Critical Theory Archive with contraband coffee and unbounded enthusiasm, reading with infinite patience primary and secondary materials whose full import I still can't comprehend.  I remember neglecting my other classes--including, ironically, the Introduction to Critical Theory course that might've grounded my extra-curricular study--in order to read, say, Derrida's new essay in Critical Inquiry.  But it's all gone.

All of it.

(Cynics among you will think I'm accusing Derrida of writing in a manner that condemns all but his broadest claims to the void.  I may very well be.  But I don't think it offensive to say that careful, continual study is required to read and remember difficult works.)

Perhaps this all falls under the principles codified in The Five Year Rule, according to which Scott declines to speak about books he's read more than five years ago because he can seldom say anything intelligent about them.  Countless times have fellow graduate students throppled by a novel they know Scott's read come to him for intelligent conversation only to have Scott stare blankly at them. 

"Jane Austen?  The name rings a bell.  A small one.  In a church fourteen districts north.  Of some place fourteen hundred miles east.  Wait!  Isn't she the sister in Middlemarch?"

Comments

[Miriam]

I remember talking about theory with an English grad student who was auditing 1st-yr. German. He informed me, rather glumly, that theory was a "use it or lose it" proposition: if you didn't watch out, it would vanish mysteriously into the ether.

[Simstim]

I find that I do a lot of unconscious mental rebadging these days, thinking up "original" things that I eventually remember having read before. I recently did this with Bourdieu and art criticism.

[sharon]

Throppled? I know I'm just an iggerant historian, but is that a real word?

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Miriam, the ether's more substantial than what I can currently say about deconstruction.

Simstim, my self-confidence being what it is, whenever a good idea strikes me, I assume it's someone else's and do the requisite research.

Sharon, "thropple" is one of those words that the little Joycean in me still loves, i.e. one that means exactly what you think it would in a given context. If I remember correctly, I first ran across it in Rob Roy...

[Simstim]

Being a historian of ideas I tend to assume that it's been said before in some form or another (he says, fudging one of the "big issues" in the field), but my mind still gets deceptively excited on occasion.

[kmort]

Interesting blog. Kind of gonzo Carrollian but worse in a good way. Derrida may be very difficult but the difficulty doesn't mean he is right or must be taken seriously. I've spent a few days with Of Grammatology and I think he does Levi-strauss various injustices, which really don't irk me, but when he moves onto the corpse of Pierce and, osiris forbid, Nietzsche, and starts spinning out his freakishness, irked I am. Quine dismissed him without a second thought as not only wrong but duplicitous and possible psychotic. I don't worship everything Quine wrote, and his assumed politics are not so appealing to marxists, but I'll side with Quine.

I have been around enought LitCrit types to realize one, they don't know shit about philosophy, and two, they don't know shit about psychology either. A guy like Berube for instance, from whose blog I have been proudly blocked--his corpulent blogbog is like some sort of temple of east coast bitch rhetoric. I doubt he could put together a valid syllogism but some lame lit-twits think's he some deep dude. His comments on Pynchon are bloated and mostly superficial "everything is relative, man" type of drivel.

[anon]

The Troll of Sorrow speaketh. Sobbith. It must be so.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Simstim, if I couldn't convince myself of my own brilliance despite my knowing better, I'd not be long for this world.

kmort, I appreciate the kind words, but I haven't nearly the hostility to literary theory as you seem to. I don't find Derrida useful myself, but I don't find everything the Man or those who favor him worthless. Two quick notes about Berube: I find him a fair reader of philosophy as applied to literature, and am completely unqualified to speak to the quality of his philosophical work qua philosophy. (His Employment of English is particularly sharp on the future and purpose of the profession.) I read his book on Pynchon and Tolson as an undergraduate, but I read it for my thesis, which as I've before, makes any opinion I've formed on it likely to be bullshit.

anon, I feel like I'd stepped into the middle of a joke and just heard the punchline. In Yiddish. Which I don't really remember all that well any more. Care to elaborate? Am I the one throwing the pity party, or is kmort? And if the latter, why are you tracking trolls? Isn't the whole idea to ignore the people you think troll?

[kmort]

I am "troll" because I had the audacity to yawp that first, students of lit. or philosophy should not abandon analytical means to truth (inductive or deductive means if you want it raw) simply because postmod or marxist academics argue those methods are oppressive or unaesthetic or misguided for whatever reason, and two, the sundayschooler-in -chief of Weblog seems, to be polite, a grubby semi-educated liberal preacher-wannabe who thinks he's ready to take on the entire tradition of Westerm Rationality and science because he translated some Derridean belch. SO now trolled, IM censored and blocked. Whatever.

I haven't read Berube's book, but I found his blog comments on Pynchon's COL 49 to be, I dont know, sort of overly conjectural, very "literary" and insufficiently informed by either science or philosophy. My assertion , perhaps wrong, is that the Berubes (and I would include Bloom or Fish or Showalter and most lit academics ) are mistaken to come at Pynchon's fiction or nearly any 20th cent writer with postmod--they are the Emory Bortz types of "textualist" critics who cannot really discuss anything other than text. I feel the relevant contexts to TP's writing are beyond mere linguistic relativism: these would include information science, as well as entropy/chaos, zany-cartoon-jazz references, but additionally behaviorism and other psychological theories, and somewhat Wittgensteinian issues as well....anyways I dont care to clog up your boxes with much writing