Pomo footnote: Stanley Fish at it Again

*Alright, since I screwed up and published this for about an hour earlier today, and since people were interested in responding, I'll throw it up now and not wait until Tuesday which is when this is stamped and when it was scheduled to go up. (Today is Sunday 13 April.) Thanks to a comment made by Keith DeRose during its brief, earlier life, it's been modified to reflect his input. Thanks also to Lori Wilson for talking me down off the ledge and encouraging me to tone it down a bit. Which I hope to have done.

Last week Stanley Fish published another essay on deconstruction. Here are two sequential paragraphs taken from it.

Instead (and this is the killer), both the “I” or the knower, and the world that is to be known, are themselves not themselves, but the unstable products of mediation, of the very discursive, linguistic forms that in the rationalist tradition are regarded as merely secondary and instrumental. The “I” or subject, rather than being the free-standing originator and master of its own thoughts and perceptions, is a space traversed and constituted — given a transitory, ever-shifting shape — by ideas, vocabularies, schemes, models, distinctions that precede it, fill it and give it (textual) being.

The Cartesian trick of starting from the beginning and thinking things down to the ground can’t be managed because the engine of thought, consciousness itself, is inscribed (written) by discursive forms which “it” (in quotation marks because consciousness absent inscription is empty and therefore non-existent) did not originate and cannot step to the side of no matter how minimalist it goes. In short (and this is the kind of formulation that drives the enemies of French theory crazy), what we think with thinks us.

John Searle said it first, but it applies here: it’s stuff like this that gives bullshit a bad name. This sure gives deconstruction a bad name. Is there one coherent thought contained in the gobbelygook of those two paragraphs? Honestly. Isn't it just so much nonsense? Literally? If not, would someone please express the sense or meaning of these sentences in English I can understand.

You see, there's a difference between not understanding a physics or engineering paper or textbook and not understanding nonsense. Nonsense can't be understood because it's nonsense. Physics can be understood, it is understand-able even if you or I can't understand it. Not so with nonsense. It's not understandable. It's nonsense. Faulting someone for not understanding nonsense is like faulting a quadrapalegic for failing to jump into a pool to save a drowning child.

And here's the thing: not all philosophy done in the deconstructive mode is nonsense. Some is perfectly sensible, helpful and useful even. I have a colleague who is a card-carrying Continental philosopher, a former student of Caputo and something of an expert on Derrida. Never have I read anything by him that is nonsense. Sometimes I haven't understood him, but not because what he said wasn't understandable, but was instead nonsense. No. Usually it's because I lack knowledge of some sort. And after he educates me, I understand perfectly well. This bit of Fish's strikes me as a fish of a different color. Seems to me that it's either nonsense or an exercise in verbal or intellectual masturbation.

Context is an important consideration, however. I understand that. I understand that there are contexts in which the written word isn't offered in the spirit of communicating or conveying a point and to fault it for failing in this regard is a mistake. Within some contexts the aim of the written word may be to inspire, agitate, play, provoke or something else entirely (think of some types of poetry, for example). But the context of this essay of Fish's is the bloody NY Times. And an editorial at that (I think). Alright. I'm done. Have at it/me.