The Emperor Is Naked: Deconstructionism

Skip the B.S.

by Skip Eisiminger

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—9/26/11—On October 11, 2004, I read a longish obituary of Jacques Derrida, the famed French deconstructionist critic who had generated tsunamis in the literary world’s tea cup for the past three decades.

At the end of the article, The New York Times’s writer opted to give his readers a sample of Derrida’s prose to illustrate a key idea from one of his final interviews collected in Philosophy in a Time of Terror (University of Chicago Press, 2003):

We do not in fact know what we are saying or naming in this way: September 11, le 11 septembre, September 11. The brevity of the appellation (September 11, 9/11) stems not only from an economic or rhetorical necessity. The telegram of this metonymy—a name, a number—points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not recognize or even cognize, that we do not yet know how to qualify, that we do not know what we are talking about.

Though I feared that Derrida had finally (in the words of Hobbes of Calvin and Hobbes) “made language a complete impediment to understanding,” I asked a colleague who teaches literary theory for a loan of the full text, thinking that a little more context might be helpful. It wasn’t.

The Times’ journalist had chosen well; he was not to blame for the stuttering repetitions, forced humor, fractured syntax, and other infelicities in Derrida any more than Derrida was responsible for what seems to me the denotative clarity of “9-11.”

Indeed, the term is so popular and expressive that it was chosen by the American Dialect Association as its “Word of the Year” in 2001. A Google search in November of 2005 turned up 85,100,000 hits and, by September 2011, this number had risen to 555,000,000. This six-fold increase should surprise no one given that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, two bitterly fought presidential elections, and the high-profile rebuilding in Washington and New York have kept the term on the cusp of our collective memory lobe over the last decade.

Assisting in our recall efforts is the coincidental fact that 911 is the country’s emergency telephone number.

I’d love to know if the date was chosen by the terrorists for its anxiety-laden connotations, but to the best of my knowledge, it wasn’t, nor was it chosen because the number eleven resembled the Twin Towers. (See snopes.com for more in this rich vein.)

Intentional or not, the term quickly picked up associations of horror in the West even as it became a rallying cry in many Muslim communities sympathetic to Al Qaeda. Of course, for many conservatives and a few militant liberals like me, it became a call to common action here as well: “9-11” to many of us was as clear a reason to go to war as any in history.

Afghanistan, at least, was no War of Jenkins’s Ear; Iraq was another story.

Before dismissing Derrida’s objections as the uninformed ramblings of a foreign speaker, I decided to ask a class of mostly senior English majors to recast in their own words and comment on the passage above while I did the same, myself.

Here’s my own paraphrase: The world refers to the terrorist attacks and the resulting loss of some three thousand lives in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania on September 11, 2001 as “9-11.” A natural desire for economy and effectiveness of expression is the main reason we have adopted it. But the truncated and somewhat cryptic term reveals our inability ever to know and characterize both what happened on that fateful day and why.

Indeed, we do not know what we are talking about when we use “9-11.”

Everyone in my class of 30 thought that Derrida had the denotation of “9-11” correct, and half agreed with his implied accusations: namely that “9-11” is “inadequate,” “premature,” “emotionless,” “vague” and, in one case, “a rank euphemism.”

One student thought the term had convinced a majority of Americans to go to war, accusing the Bush administration of turning ”9-11” into a “shrill jingoistic cry” like “Remember the Maine,” or, “Remember the Alamo.”

But one shouldn’t blame the term for the way it is used or misused. There’s nothing intrinsic in “9-11” (or for that matter, in “the Holocaust” and “Pearl Harbor”) that lends itself to manipulation or distortion. To me, the denotation is abundantly clear; connotations naturally and inevitably will vary. But saying that “9-11” is inherently a war cry is like blaming “Christmas” and “the 4^th of July” for implying commercialism and pomposity respectively. In the latter case, the blame belongs solely to those bandstand orators over the last 200 years who have let their love of country cloud their better judgment.

According to one student, Derrida’s chief objection to “9-11” was its prematurity: “We adopted this term without due consideration,” she thought. When this point was discussed in class, I said that people of all cultures traditionally name the baby at birth or shortly thereafter. In some societies, people get a new name after an initiation or confirmation, but the new name may need adjustments, and the old is seldom discarded without regret.

Indeed, “9-11” might change if there’s a larger tragedy on some future September 11^th the way “The Great War” became “World War I” in the 1940s as fifty-five million lay dead or dying.

Personally, I cannot fault anyone for quickly adopting the term. Effective discourse demanded that we name it something; we did, it stuck, and it’s not going away. Can 555,000,000 usages all be wrong?

As for “9-11” being “a rank euphemism,” I’d have to disagree as well.

There are circumlocutions and there are roundabout expressions, but in the worst sense (“guestage” for “hostage”), euphemisms are criminally evasive; subterfuges that seek to obscure something offensive or false for all the wrong reasons. (Recall, for example, Adolf Eichmann saying at his trial that he was “an expert on migration problems.”)

Personally, I find no felonious intent in “9-11.” Had we dubbed the tragedy “Bush’s Blooper,” we would have deserved all the scorn we surely would have received. It’s possible the tragedy might have been called “World Trade Center” or “WTC” or “Ground Zero,” tying the tragedy to the place rather than the time, but “9-11” has a natural trochaic rhythm that “WTC” lacks.

Plus, the latter ignores what happened in Washington and Pennsylvania. Should the term allude to the mangled bodies more directly? In fact, “Bloody Tuesday” has been used 6,430 times according to Google in connection with “9-11”—a far cry from 555,000,000.

As for the term being shortened to a fault, I would remind these critics of Zipf’s Law and point them to Maya Lin’s Viet Nam War Memorial in Washington, DC, especially now juxtaposed as it is with that affectation of grandeur, the World War II Monument, across the Mall.

The understatement of Lin’s triangular slabs of black marble plowing their way to a halt in some of this nation’s most hallowed ground is possibly the most moving memorial ever created. Few who have visited it have left dry-eyed. What better way to commemorate the dead in a war that America lost than inscribe the names of the 58,000 fallen on a figurative instrument of frustration and hopelessness? “9-11” has the same poignant simplicity with its overtones of a fumbled emergency call while a loved one lies gasping at the caller’s feet.

One student who disagreed with Derrida’s brusque dismissal of “9-11” thought it was a haiku, a rough stone dropped into the well of her consciousness that brought up reminders of the New York firemen, the leadership of Mayor Guiliani, Al Qaeda, and the continuing threat of terrorist attack. A longer more descriptive “poem,” the student felt, probably would not have had the richness this simple time reference has.

One of her classmates thought that while the metonymy the world has taken to heart and mind cannot represent the full horror of the day, “What more can we do? We communicate with signs and symbols all the time and, if we are careful, we are successful more often than not.”

I agree. Walker Percy pointedly observed that the deconstructionist is one who charges language with the inability to communicate but leaves a phone message for his wife to bring home a pepperoni pizza. If the critic’s wife brings home the pizza requested, who can sincerely argue that language is “radically indeterminate.”

Isn’t Derrida left with mozzarella in his mustache?

Does language ever fail us? Of course it does. Recall the postcard writer who wrote, “The scenery is here; wish you were beautiful.”

Or June Cleaver’s famous command to her husband, “Ward, come upstairs and talk to the Beaver.”

Or this sign announcing the opening of a new business: “Owned and Operated by a Clemson Grad and Formal CU Footbal Player.”

Or this classified ad advertising a house for sale: “Brick, hardwood floors; this one won’t last.”

Or this sentence from the Fresno Bee: “The new taxes will put debt-ridden Massachusetts back in the African-American.”

Or, finally, George W. Bush saying on Oct. 18, 2004, “September the 4^th, 2001, I stood in the ruins of the Twin Towers. It’s a day I will never forget.”

To Derrida’s claim that a text means nothing or so many things that it’s meaningless, and to the fundamentalist’s claim that a text has a single literal meaning, the New Critics might say, as Laurence Perrine once argued, “A text may mean many things, not all of them.”

As an old New Critic, that places me squarely in the middle, which is where Aristotle said virtue resides. Post-modern theorists like Derrida have been described by their detractors as “gulls in a trawler’s wake” or “eunuchs in a harem.” Derrida’s paragraph at the start of this essay is a long, unhappy way from John Crowe Ransom’s definition: “[A critic is] one who in dealing with a work of art creates a little work of art in its honor.”

Ransom’s ideal is so lofty it makes me a bit dizzy, so my model is a bit more pragmatic: it’s the work of a scholar like Dr. Matthew Bruccoli formerly of the University of South Carolina, one of whose specialties is American literature in the Jazz Age. I recall approaching him once when I was in graduate school about a problem I was having with a passage in The Great Gatsby. My question was whether the Montenegrin Orderi de Danilo medal that Gatsby claimed he was awarded in The Great War would have been inscribed in English.

Professor Bruccoli smiled as he reached into his pocket and to my astonishment pulled out one of the rare Montenegrin medals he’d recently purchased at auction. He then pointed out that on his medal and all others like it there is no inscription because it is coated with a ceramic glaze which cannot be engraved. Now that’s the sort of clarity and authority I expect from a critic!

For myself, I shall seek aid from critics and scholars of Bruccoli’s caliber until Jacques Derrida and his disciples can give me definitive answers without brushing me off saying language and art can only approximate reality. We know that.

And I shall abide by the words of Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms, “There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.”

Did you hear that Professor Derrida? “Certain dates . . . were all you could say and have them mean anything.”

[A fuller version of this essay was published in The Vocabula Review, May 2006 and is available in the magazine’s archives.]