GERALD GRAFF
571
In a curious way, the attempt to claim that all standards (includ–
ing one's own) are fictions of power has the same philosophically
quixotic character as the attempt to claim that standards are abso–
lute . Both strategies constitute an attempt
to
climb outside one's
own skin, to lay claim to know something we could never be in a
position to know about the very underpinning of our concepts. For if
we can't step outside our conceptual framework in order to deter–
mine that it corresponds to reality, neither can we step outside that
framework in order
to
declare it a set of fictions imposed by political
power. Derrida frequently acknowledges this point: indeed, it's
unnecessary to refute the philosophically subversive claims of
Derridean deconstruction, since Derrida already provides us with an
elaborate refutation of these claims throughout his own work.
Having struggled to break the hold of our categories of intelligi–
bility, Derrida is in a good position to appreciate the difficulties of
this project. His early critiques in
Writing and Difference
of the would–
be epistemological ruptures attempted by Foucault, Bataille,
Artaud, and others are the most effective answer to Derrida's previ–
ously quoted argument, offered against John Searle's speech-act the–
ory, that the conventions of intelligibility are "by essence violable
and precarious,
in themselves
and by the fictionality that constitutes
them.... " According to Derrida's own earlier reasoning, there is
simply no standpoint from which Searle's conventions of intelligibil–
ity could be labeled a fiction; however much we may try to put intel–
ligibility in question, we can do so only from within its framework–
unless we wish simply to talk nonsense. It may be pertinent
to
note
that the formula "put in question," so widely in use as a rhetorical
gambit in recent critical polemics ("But you haven ' t put your own
language in question!")-as if merely to utter the phrase were to
deliver a devastating and unanswerable refutation-is as unclear in
its implications as the proposition that everything is power. After
cept of totality from deconstructive attacks, argues that this concept is "at work in
those very post-structuralist philosophies which explicitly repudiate such 'totaliza–
tions ' in the name of difference, flux, dissemination and heterogeneity; Deleuze's
conception of the schizophrenic text and Derridean deconstruction come to mind.
If
such perceptions are to be celebrated in their intensity, they must be accompanied
by some initial appearance of continuity, some ideology of unification already in
place, which it is their mission to rebuke and to shatter." Jameson adds that "these
are second-degree or critical philosophies, which reconfirm the status of totality by
their very reaction against it."
