Christopher

NorrisDeconstruction

Theory and Practice

3rd edition

London and New York

First published in 1982 by Methuen & Co. LtdReprinted in 1986 with a revised bibliography

Revised edition first published in 1991by Routledge11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canadaby Routledge29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

Reprinted 1991, 1993, 1996, 1998, 2000

This edition first published 2002

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group

© 1982, 1986, 1991, 2002 Christopher Norris

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craftily disguises its workings by imputing them always to the adver-sary camp. Truth is simply the honorific title assumed by an argumentwhich has got the upper hand – and kept it – in this war of competingpersuasions. If anything, the sophist comes closer to wisdom by impli-citly acknowledging what Socrates has to deny: that thinking is alwaysand inseparably bound to the rhetorical devices that support it.

DECONSTRUCTION ON TWO WHEELS

Nietzsche’s transvaluation of philosophy therefore demanded a returnto source and an effort to deconstruct the ruling metaphors of reasonitself. There is an odd but revealing parallel to this in Robert Pirsig’snovel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), where the narrativeinterest has more to do with Greek philosophy than with ZenBuddhism, as many readers have no doubt been puzzled to find. Thecentral figure is a man on the verge of breakdown and despair who setsout on a coast-to-coast motorcycle trip across America in search ofself-understanding. What emerges gradually in the course of this questis a whole buried prehistory of psychic and intellectual conflict which– we come to realize – led up to the events of the novel. Through asequence of dimly remembered episodes the narrator reconstructsa portrait of his own previous life, the last few months of which werespent as a student of philosophy at the University of Chicago. Underthe pseudonym ‘Phaedrus’ – adopted for reasons which soon becomeclear – this doomed alter ego is shown in the process of challengingall the basic assumptions handed down by his teachers on pain ofacademic excommunication.

When Phaedrus begins to read back into the sources, especially thetexts of Plato and Aristotle, he finds their arguments not onlyunconvincing but deviously angled in such a way as everywhere tomisrepresent their forgotten opponents. The sophists, in particular, areheld up to philosophic ridicule by a method of argument which twiststheir case into a parody of its own just-visible outline. From Socratesdown through Plato and Aristotle, the evidence points to a massivesuppression and misinterpretation of everything that threatened thesovereign power of dialectical reason.

Phaedrus himself is cast as a latter-day victim of this same

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‘conspiracy’, suffering the taunts of professors and students unwillingto question received wisdom. The ‘Church of Reason’ is too firmlyestablished in Chicago, with its neo-Aristotelian stress on the virtues ofclear-cut logical analysis and firmly categorical thinking. The troublecomes to a head for Phaedrus when his class is taken over – ominously– by the Chairman for the Committee on Analysis of Ideas and Study ofMethod. What ensues – at least in Phaedrus’s inflamed imagination – isan ultimate duel of wits between ‘dialectic’ and ‘rhetoric’, with rhet-oric decisively winning the day. The turning-point comes with hisrealization that ‘ “dialectic” had some special meaning that made it afulcrum word – one that can shift the balance of an argument, depend-ing on how it’s placed’. By challenging the Chairman to explain theprovenance of dialectic – its ‘genealogy’, in Nietzschean terms –Phaedrus shows it to rest on a willed and systematic forgetting of itsown rhetorical origins. Reason, or the supposed self-evidence ofreason, is thrown into doubt by its manifest failure to justify itsmethods on other than purely tautological grounds. Hence Phaedrus’striumphant conclusion:

The halo round the heads of Plato and Socrates is now gone. He seesthat they are consistently doing that which they accuse the Sophists ofdoing – using emotionally persuasive language for the ulterior pur-pose of making the weaker argument, the case for dialectic, appear thestronger. We always condemn most in others, he thought, that whichwe most fear in ourselves.

(Pirsig 1974, p. 378)

But that way madness lies. Phaedrus cannot communicate his discoverywithin the norms of institutionalized knowledge and ‘dialogue’ sozealously preserved by the Chicago Aristotelians. He leaves the uni-versity and suffers (like Nietzsche) a protracted – though in his case notterminal – nervous collapse.

The ‘original’ Phaedrus, in Plato’s dialogue of that title, is yetanother foil for Socrates, a young and vaunting rhetorician whoseheadlong gambits are neatly anticipated at every turn (see Plato 1973).As far as the latter-day Phaedrus is concerned, this exchangesimply follows the standard pattern of an argument ignoring its own

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complicity with the tricks and devices of which it sternly disapproves.The Phaedrus is also, as it happens, a crucial text for Derrida’s reading ofGreek philosophy. It contains Plato’s most vigorous attack upon writ-ing, couched in the same familiar terms – ‘presence’ versus ‘absence’,living speech versus the dead letter – as made up the argument ofRousseau’s essay. Writing is the dangerous ‘supplement’ which lureslanguage away from its authentic origins in speech and self-presence.To commit one’s thoughts to writing is to yield them up to the publicdomain, thus exposing them to all the promiscuous wiles of interpret-ation. Writing is the ‘death’ that lies in wait for living thought, thesubtle agent of corruption whose workings infect the very sources oftruth. Plato’s case against rhetoric is therefore of a piece with his atti-tude to writing. Both are seen as the rebellious servant to a master(truth or dialectic) whose authority they flout by setting themselves upas alternative paths to wisdom.

As Pirsig’s Phaedrus accounts for it, rhetoric was denatured anddeprived of its force through being treated as merely a collection ofclassified devices, reducible to system and order. Aristotle brought thisprocess to a high point of rational perfection: ‘Rhetoric has become anobject, and as an object has parts. And the parts have relationships toone another and these relations are immutable’ (Pirsig 1974, p. 368).Whence, incidentally, the motorcycle connection: a machine forPhaedrus is more than the sum of its parts as laid out in a servicemanual.

Curiously enough, the novel never mentions Nietzsche, though itsmanner of engaging philosophic issues is everywhere prompted by aNietzschean spirit of critique. The crucial question Phaedrus poses –whence the authority of Socratic reason? – is posed and answered byNietzsche in strikingly similar terms. It is rhetoric, not dialectic, whichtakes us back furthest toward the origin of thought in man’s encounterwith experience: ‘Dialectic, which is the parent of logic, came itselffrom rhetoric. Rhetoric is in turn the child of the myths and poetry ofancient Greece’ (ibid., p. 391). Phaedrus is thus led back to the pre-Socratic philosophers, those shadowy figures whom Nietzscheadmired for having the courage of their own metaphors. These thinkershad identified reality with various elemental forces in the naturalworld. For Thales the ‘immortal principle’ was that of water, while

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Anaximenes varied the metaphor to air, and Heraclitus – thephilosopher of change and flux – saw fire as the element of all things.Their ‘explanations’ were of course a species of poetic analogy,and yield small sense to the rational (or post-Socratic) mind. But, asPhaedrus declares, ‘everything is analogy’, including the presumptivegeneralizations involved in dialectical argument. The difference is thatthe dialectician, unlike his ‘irrational’ precursor, fails to recognize thisoperative movement in the process of thought itself.

WRITING AND PHILOSOPHY

Deconstruction begins with the same gesture of turning reason againstitself to bring out its tacit dependence on another, repressed orunrecognized, level of meaning. Phaedrus’s glimpse of how the con-cept dialectic could be used as a ‘fulcrum’ to achieve this reversal is verymuch in keeping with Derrida’s textual strategies. In his texts on Greekphilosophy Derrida traces some of the ruses and devices by whichwriting is systematically opposed to the values of truth, self-presenceand origin. But why this animus towards writing? The likeliest histor-ical explanation, adopted by many scholars, is that writing was a rela-tively new development at this stage in Greek cultural life, and thatPlato tended to mistrust what he saw as its dangerous diffusion ofknowledge and power. This argument clearly has much in commonwith the Nietzschean-Derridean view of Socratic reason as a tyranniz-ing force of repression. On the other hand it ignores the textualstrategies and the deep-grained metaphysics of presence which adeconstructive reading uncovers. For Derrida the suppression ofwriting is no mere accident of chronology or quirk of a culture intransition. It operates, in Plato and his numerous descendants, througha mode of self-perpetuating rhetoric unglimpsed by the conventionalhistorian of ideas.

That this attitude to writing has remained deeply entrenched can beseen from a text like F. M. Cornford’s Before and After Socrates (1932), awidely read introduction to Greek philosophy and its background.Cornford shows a kind of condescending patience with the sophists,treating them as adolescent rebels on the way to Socratic wisdom anddignity. When he comes to the relationship between Socrates and Plato,

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