Peter Shaw
THE POLITICS OF DECONSTRUCTION
In the past few years deconstructionist literary criticism,
after enjoying a seeming exemption from close scrutiny by outsiders,
has been subjected to a number of searching critiques. As a result ,
the intellectual implications of the movement have begun to be under–
stood, and it has lost its sacrosanct aura. Deconstruction has been
challenged on philosophical grounds for its dismissal of traditional
Western thought and identified as a threat both to literary criticism
and discourse in general. Yet among the now numerous critiques of
deconstruction, there has been virtually no mention of what is argu–
ably the movement's most significant feature: its origins in radical
politics .
These origins continue to go unmentioned despite Gerald Graff's
1978 essay, "The Politics of Realism," and his subsequent "Textual
Leftism," which together showed that deconstruction amounted to
a politically inspired attack on the philosophical underpinnings of
bourgeois society. The basis of this attack was the recognition by
political radicals of the degree to which certain common assumptions
- that we live in an objectively knowable world and that we are able
to communicate its nature to one another- make possible the day–
to-day operation of society. The radicals put it that bourgeois society
actually controls its populace and prevents revolution not so much
by force as through its control of concepts such as these. Realistic
writing, for example, even when it is "radical in content ," serves this
society, as Graff explains the radical argument, merely by employing
"formal modes of perception that [are] conventional and reaction–
ary ." These modes lure the reader away from revolution by securing
his acceptance of the world as it is .
It
follows from this analysis that whoever helps to undermine
the bourgeois perception of reality by attacking the concepts of logic,
rationality, objectivity, and above all reality, strikes a politically rev–
olutionary blow. To be sure , critics have been attracted to the decon–
structionist mode from a variety of traditions and motives, many of
them removed from politics . Yet in joining the assault on reason,
they have willy-nilly lent themselves to the political agenda of decon–
struction .
The aim of Marxist literary criticism has always been to make
