Anotherheideggerblog has a terrific interview with Bogost. It’s filled with all sorts of gems and nuggets. His observations about deconstruction are particularly interesting:
In this respect, Derrida opened my eyes in ways I will always be grateful for (as I will for the influential American deconstructionists I had the benefit of studying under), but once my eyes were opened, I didn’t know what I saw. Nothing. A blank vista. A desert.
Why? Deconstruction is superb at setting things in eternal motion, like some wild steampunk apparatus fastened with magnets of opposing poles. And that apparatus is mesmerizing. But beyond enchantment, it offers little direction on what practical steps to take. It is a paperweight. Once things are destabilized, then what? It is poetic and moving to assert, like Samuel Beckett, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on,” but what sort of coward or psychopath would leave his companions stranded there, in the desert, with this useless joke of a compass? Go where, exactly? To do what, precisely? What’s the third term, the structure that offers alternative to the aporia without reconciling it? Deconstruction can never answer this question, by definition, yet it is where the real work resides.
Read the rest here.
Larval Subjects . 
July 30, 2009 at 12:48 am
i am in the throws of a dissertation chapter on derrida, and thinking i’d take a break, i decided to catch up on some blog reading… and yet here i am, and here he is…
well.
ian bogost’ interview was very interesting, thought provoking. but this bit on Derrida was quite the standard response. yet for Derrida, as with Deleuze, the work is done in the asking and raising of more questions, not in finalizing answers to them. it is not avoidance but openness, hospitality really, that doesn’t close things off. that being said, i do understand the desire for answers, finality – reification is usually quite beautiful and satisfying. for a bit. and i think this is where and why the thinking of friendship is such an important derridian move. from aristotle forward, friendship is highly political – yet it is both an openness and a response. it is a way in which i am fed by and feeding an other who is never my same, and this is why the answers (if we want to call them that) come in the friending. they cannot be forclosed, predicted, predicated… they are something of bakhtin’s dialogical in that truth is created in the ‘friending’ if you will… and i would like to suggest this goes beyond, with derrida’s critique of humanism, ‘we’ and community, an anthropologic view.
and i am ranting already. better to put that back into my dissertation, eh?
take care
nikki
http://prosthetics.wordpress.com
July 30, 2009 at 1:25 am
Nikki, thanks for your thoughts. I’d add that your response is the standard response to the response: the openness of difference and deferral. But one does not even need to take Derrida to extremes to discover that deferral takes the place of all other thought, even to the point that we begin believing that specifics are specific, when really they never manage to make it that far.
I’m not sure if you read my full response in the interview or just the part Levi excerpted, but I’m actually very fond of Derrida, and have strongly mixed feelings about my feelings about him. But you make it sound as though I misunderstand Derrida’s thinking. I don’t. I simply reject its appeal. Back to the old Whitehead aphorism that’s been making the rounds lately: philosophies are never disproved, but merely abandoned.
It’s funny you mention reification, because that’s precisely what so many of us around these parts are interested in… but not the reification of the arrest of otherness, or what have you, rather the reification of the real. Can one simultaneously believe in things and differance? Sure. Maybe that’s even built-in, so to speak, old news. Then when we ask ourselves, now what, we find that deconstruction isn’t very much help, at all.
July 30, 2009 at 2:00 am
I personally think there’s quite a difference between Derrida and Deleuze on these points. In Derrida you get this sort of fascination with infinite deferral and undoing, this openness that never settles anywhere. More importantly, I think the case can be made that Derrida never really theorizes anything (though I have to be careful here as texts like Given Time somewhat theorize things). Rather, what Derrida instead does is show the ruin or undoing of every attempt at theorization.
By contrast, while Deleuze advocates an ontology of becoming and is an anti-essentialist, he is certainly not interested in simply undoing things. Rather, all over the place we get robust theoretical accounts of various domains of the world in Deleuze’s thought. He genuinely, for example, wants to give an account of what cinema is in his two cinema books. Deleuze thus gives us “theories of”, where we don’t really get anything analogous in Derrida. And for those seeking to understand the world about them, “undoing” will only get you so far. At a certain point you have to provide “theories of” as a way of engaging with the world around you. Is this reification? In a sense. Given that the world is of bewildering complexity, any theory is an attempt to present a simpler modeling of some feature of the world. However, it seems to me that the central problem is not so much reification as essentialization. If, pace Plato, I say such and such is the essence of ducks and that this essence is eternal and unchanging, that’s a real problem theoretically. If, however, pace Darwin I say such and such are the features of ducks, I am making claims about historically emergent properties that belong to a particular population in the world at a particular point in time. The key difference is that such a characterization of “duck essences” within Darwinism “always already” contains two footnotes: 1) that insofar as we’re talking about about a population, this claim is an average generalization across members of that population that is more or less common to these members, i.e., the population is already a multiplicity, and 2) this “essence” is only a local emergence of certain properties that will change throughout time. My point is that we can talk about stable features of things without falling into an essentializing reification or a “metaphysics of presence”… Indeed, we have to. I also worry that deconstruction becomes the very thing it critiques: a reified method applied in a formulaic way that always knows what it’s going to find in advance and is thus unable to welcome the alterity of the work it examines or be open to that work.
July 30, 2009 at 2:17 am
My point is that we can talk about stable features of things without falling into an essentializing reification or a “metaphysics of presence”… Indeed, we have to.
Right, this is what I was getting at above too… there’s something to learn from deconstruction, and I think we’ve learned it. But now we have to get to work.
July 30, 2009 at 5:58 am
ian, levi – thanks for your responses and insights.
first, off, or really second (even fifth) by now, derrida certainly doesn’t need me to save him. or his work. and the whole of your interview was lovely, ian, regarding the conference, dinner and drinks… so i get on a soap box and put that under a name, a man, a work, but it is really the ideas i am interested in and i think, levi, you have raised some very interesting ones in the comparison/contrast with deleuze and this bit about duck essences.
what i am drawn to in difference and differance (which i prefer to build or jump off of as i think it is all too easy to read the de- in deconstruction) is multiplicity and the movement of the question, which i do also agree is different between Deleuze and Derrida. (to call a sameness here would be blasphemy, eh?!) and yes, i agree, this multiplicity doesn’t preclude us from talking about or describing things, making choices, plans, etc but it does change the nature of inquiry in a way which i don’t think truly is or can be abandoned. what differance and/or difference open up is a more suspicious relationship to mastery. it is the cautioning around reification that is almost intuitive now even as it is endorsed. it is the cautioning around essence even as it is sought. i am on board with your ducks, levi, and i am on board with the ‘what next’, Ian. i suppose i would just like to suggest that given Nietzsche in the not-so-background for both Deleuze and Derrida there was always the last man and the coming of the overman. differance cannot be the last stop, but it is something vital (even if now forgotten in its already under the skin intimacy) to any move.
July 30, 2009 at 3:24 pm
nikki – I think we’re all agreeing on the fundamentals, more or less, so I’m not going to belabor this much. I do want to emphasize that I think the “cautioning” you mention has (had? maybe this is changing) taken the place of all else, including the very adoption of that caution. A bespoke straightjacket, so to speak.
Anyway, there’s more in the interview than just Derrida :).
August 1, 2009 at 3:25 pm
“Once things are destabilized, then what? It is poetic and moving to assert, like Samuel Beckett, “I can’t go on, I’ll go on,” but what sort of coward or psychopath would leave his companions stranded there, in the desert, with this useless joke of a compass?”
Sounds a bit like an analyst…
August 7, 2009 at 3:27 am
Just putting a word in here for creative acts, or the paradox of “making” when whatever one is making is unmaking itself even as it is being contingently made.
As Ian and nikki have pointed out, the pro and con of this has all evolved into the standard schtick on this topic, and I have nothing to add there.
But I might also bring up a point of aesthetics, maybe another tired horse in this debate. The common point of this group of anti-foundationalist anti-theory theories is that you have to go through, embrace it, to get past it to the next thing. You can’t duck the issues, or go around them, they say.
So makers keep making anyway, giving it an honest try, making destabilized and destabilizing things. What’s the problem here?
My problem is that this sort of leaves us with a group of novels that have only one plot or theme, and a boring and tiresome and overdone plot at that.
Every story is the ironic story of myself looking in a mirror at myself looking in a mirror at myself looking in a mirror…
Say what you want about that “art’s” theoretical brilliance, but as art, I’d just say it’s repetitive and bad. I don’t care if every song is just a variation of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, but 30 years ago (25? I have no real sense of time) the makers who wholehheartedly embraced this anti-foundationalist frame (heh) started making really crappy art, not just for themselves, but as a dominant aesthetic.
Now, I’m not saying it’s all crap (if it’s not Scottish, it’s crap! ). There will be some who rise above the dominant aesthetic of their times, but I’d say the dominant aesthetic sure isn’t doing artists, writers, makers any favors.
So have we reached a point where the repetitive single plot, single theme, unmaking-while-making THINGIE can be wheeled off the stage?
Can we get away with making without constantly having to winkie winkie at unmaking, or be deemed out of touch and naive?