‘Deconstruction as Criticism’

In science, conceptual progress as well as ‘the wandering off into different fields,’ without which there is no such progress, leads to the impossibility of asking questions and explaining problems which were essential to the previous theoretical configuration. Indeed, such a loss is not considered a serious one for ‘there is no need to possess such knowledge,’ as the only one thing legitimately to be demanded of a theory ‘is that it should give us a correct account of the world, i.e., of the totality of facts as constituted by its own basic concepts,’ ¹ What is true of science is in principle also true of literary criticism. If ‘the context of discovery’ comes into conflict with ‘the context of justification,’ ² if the reading devices produce discoveries that the previous theories can no longer account for, and if in the eyes of the traditional critic it becomes undecidable ‘whether a new view explains what it is supposed to explain, or whether it does not wander off into different fields,’ ³ then one may speak of what Paul Feyerabend calls the incommensurability of approaches. Yet, is this incommensurability as securely established as some of the Newer Critics - the socalled deconstructive critics - and most of their opponents would like to believe? Implicitly, a distinction such as Wayne C. Booth’s between monism and limited pluralism (i.e., liberalism) acknowledges already that the seemingly mutually exclusive approaches to literature are about the same. What Booth’s conceptual system vouches for - an intimate affinity of traditional academic criticism in all its forms and deconstructive criticism, a commensurability 127without the knowledge of the critics (Booth included) - is one of the presuppositions of this article. However, rather than representing a conciliatory gesture in the direction of a ‘critical commonwealth’ whose access depends on the critics’ statements seen as ‘a passport into the country of debate’ ⁴ and far from being a belief into the continuity of tradition, the stand taken here is critical of deconstructive literary criticism, and maintains that it is incapable of living up to its pretensions. For the problem of either thematic criticism and/or New Criticism (only disguised by a new and sometimes fashionable vocabulary) still dominates the post-structuralist approaches,' ⁵ in spite of their rhetoric. Apart from this rhetoric there is no trace of what Bachelard called an epistemological break. ⁶ In no way does such a judgement disqualify or impair the contributions of modern deconstructive criticism. On the contrary: in the wake of New Criticism deconstructive criticism has developed now indispensable insights into the very object of literary criticism, the text. But just as science textbooks represent a sort of obstruction within the ongoing activity of scientific research, ⁷ much of what appears as deconstructive criticism contributes more to prolonging the impasses of traditional academic criticism than to opening up new areas of research. Hence the generalized discomfort about, in particular, deconstructive criticism. But the critical malaise of modern critics that makes them long for a ‘beyond-deconstruction’ and simultaneously allows the attacks of the rear-guard, stems in the first place from a mutual misunderstanding of the notion of deconstruction. It is precisely this misinterpretation that makes its accommodation by American criticism possible, and, by the same token, transforms it into a mechanical exercise similar to academic thematism or formalism.