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In the wake of such remarks, the critique of deconstruction from
other, nonpolitical quarters, has taken courage . One can now find in
print, for example, vigorous denials of the doctrine that the imper–
fections of communication add up to chaos. Critics, while granting
that no written communication is perfect, and that readers derive
varying impressions from what they read, no longer accept that these
circumstances justify concluding that the message can never get
through. Substantially, it is now being said, we do understand one
another. More generally, although it is undeniable that certain logi–
cal propositions can always be called into question , the French critics
Foucault, Piaget, Barthes, Derrida, and others have no warrant, as
Geoffrey Thurley puts it in his book,
Counter-Modernism in Current
Critical Theory
(1983), for asserting "that because some statements
cannot be verified no statements can."
With arguments such as these on the one side, and the radical
attack on the other, it is not difficult to predict the decline of decon–
struction . But it would be a mistake either to regard deconstruction
as a passing curiosity, or to declare as Terry Eagleton does that de–
construction merely "cancels all the way through and leaves every–
thing just as it was ." Such conclusions may possibly be justified if
one is measuring direct political results in the world at large . But
from the more enduring perspective of ideas, things are by no means
just as they were .
In the first place deconstruction now reigns as the one prestige
subject capable of drawing graduate students of literature to extra–
curricular study groups in literary theory, where the subject inevita–
bly devolves into structuralism. Generations of such students by now
have written dissertations and built careers either wholly or partly
under the influence of deconstruction. The more nimble of them
may prove able to step along to the next literary orthodoxy, but even
these few will, in the normal way of academics, continue to transmit
the concepts and techniques they absorbed in graduate school.
In the second place, deconstructionist attitudes, especially skep–
ticism about the existence of any firm knowledge and the replacement
of rationality by subjectivity, have spread beyond literary theory to
virtually every corner of literary study. A recent book on the subject
of scholarly biography, for example, calls on the researcher to depend
on "an intuitive sense of his subject , although this often means the
manipulation of data ." Such "freedom from fact," we are informed,
"has recently become celebrated by contemporary biographers as a
new methodology ."
