HEATHER MacDONALD
557
The most important effect of Derrida's radical claim, however, is to
foreclose debate. Repudiating in advance any meaning for his words allows
Derrida to slip out of his language, leaving the critic holding onto something
Derrida denies ever owning. It provides him with a ready-made response to
criticism ofhis work: the critic's interpretation has reified his thought, reduced
it to a fixed meaning, whereas deconstruction is intended as the very nemesis
offixed meanings. But Derrida and his following cannot both use language
and repudiate its consequences. Language inevitably makes distinctions,
categorizes, and signifies something rather than nothing or everything at
once. To use one word is to decide against another, but Derrida does not
want to be held to his choice. In fact, in spite of a prodigious and largely
successful effort to mask his intent, Derrida does have something to say. If
he truly wanted to signify nothing, he could suspend his torrential output of
books and articles.
The assertion made at the Whitney that postmodernism is a "practice"
(that is, ineffable) is a broader version of Derrida's claim that his words
transcend definition. It is no less disingenuous. Post-ist "practice" is wholly
predictable. When applied to literatl:lre, it operates like a pair of automatic
shears. No matter what the shape of the original poem or novel, the decon–
structed version will come out shorn of its characters, plots, themes, and pas–
sion, talking exclusively about the insights of post-ism ("the text always al–
ready knows that its desire for the signified will be mutilated by the abyssal
logic of the signifier," and so on). A postmodernist work of art is obsessed
with, or, in the language of high theory, "problematises," representation,
doubling, and absence. The predictability of post-ist "practice" results from
certain assumptions about language and the self that form the theoretical
framework of that "practice." These assumptions are few, dogmatic, and un–
changing, and could be communicated to an outsider without irreparable
damage to post-ist thought. Works of art or theory deemed "postmodernist"
are rooted in various fundamentals of the poststructuralist creed, such as the
fictional status of the human subject, the dreary obsession with "absence" - in
particular the absence of origins and originals - and the paradoxical view that
representation is at once all-powerful and impotent in its main task of refer–
ring to the world outside ofitsel£
The desire to appear spontaneous and antihierarchical also motivates
the disclaimer of a post-ist canon. No syllabus drawn from the beleaguered
canon of "Western Civilization," however, was ever as monotonous or as
devoid of surprise, as the syllabi of contemporary courses in literary theory
and the footnotes of such journals as
Artforum
or
October.
Any humanities
department with pretensions to being a respectable player at Modern Lan–
guage Association conventions liberally sows its literature curriculum with the
identical set ofmosdy French theoreticians now thriving at Duke University,
the University of California at Irvine, and other current centers of post-ist
