The meaning shifted from the control of the author to the ambitious reader who was an academician and the second half of the twentieth century became the age of scholars. Democracy and Print capitalism created the avenue for a high production of literature on one side and scholarship on the other side. Literary theory became the necessity of the time to discern the Word. The world wars had brought a lot of questions about the phenomena. Critics began talking about the death of literature. The western mind in its post modern condition began questioning established attitudes.
How do we take this enormous flexibility of meanings to the class room? When this age dismissed the authorial intention as autocratic, what does the teacher do in a classroom for interpreting the text? Or, shall we leave interpretation to the students? Can hermeneutics be practiced in a democratic manner in a class room? When we deal with a text carrying the history of an alien culture, is it possible to ignore the authorial intention completely? These are the Indian questions in a class of students reading English literature.
For instance, how do we take deconstruction to the classroom? The young student thinks he can deconstruct any text and he does it with the ease of a bird flying in the air. He feels all texts are faulty; all writers have political agendas; there is nothing great about great literature; why, there is no great literature; all writings are coloured with materialism; so, why learn anything from it; I am a much better person; I know more than most of these writers; literature is high culture, the sign of hegemony and we have to tear its pretensions.
Reading material meanings alone in literature breeds negative attitude. The young mind is either depressed or becomes too arrogant of itself.
Can we read Derrida from a humanistic perspective? How de we introduce Derrida to our students? Deconstruction is basically a sharp analytical method. Derrida insists on “Why the why?”(166). What could be the intention of the rigorous questioning of Derrida?
Said does not bother about this aspect of the Derridian question. He wants to know why the European academic thought was materialistic. The question in Derridian style would be – why does Said ask these questions? The next question automatically follows – is the thought of Said non-materialistic? When we take Orientalism to the classroom, we need to question it from both ways. That would be a complete deconstruction of the whole thing. Deconstruction not only aims at deconstructing the Other, but also at it’s self.
Derrida searches for a pure language, a pure literature. Metaphors carry human thought – good and evil - light and darkness. How did this division enter the human soul, and thus human language? Can we speak without negativity? The moment we define something as good, automatically something else becomes bad. In desperation Derrida wants to renounce language. He brings our attention to the duality of mind and thought.
Deconstruction can become a method to arrive at self-knowledge. When we understand the evil or the selfishness in our mind, we might accept it in others. We understand that the Being has to survive and it needs certain qualities for self-preservation.
Why does Derrida deconstruct Emmanul Levinas? How does he handle deconstruction?
Levinas moves over to ethics beyond the framework of the supposed to be objective philosophy. That is Derrida’s contention. All the while Derrida has immense respect for Levinas’ question – “Can one respect the Other as Other, and expel negativity?” (142). Technological violence has exposed western intellectuals to the reality of arrogance of the Right. How do we treat people different from us? How should Hitler have treated the Jews who were different from him? The Derridean questions are Jewish questions. Derrida asks: “Are we Jews? Are we Greeks?”(191) the questions are directed at himself, his historicity. He deconstructs his attitudes – his position of thought.
Can there be pure writing or pure thought without historicity? Derrida says that there can be only one writing –“the law of earth”. “All other writings contain the amalgamation of a certain number of age-old truths” (10). “Age old truths”, then, are found in the Word. It is found in the texts of Jews, or Greeks or the British or American or Indian. Writing cannot take place without the presence of age-old truths just as it is materialistic. However divided human thought is, still there is something immense, something healing, soothing in the Word. This is the deep structure of Derridean thought. This thought is there along with his meticulous readings of other texts. This age old truths, found in every literature revives every civilization. This is the role of literature – its contribution to human society.
We have to teach our students to respect this age old truths in literature. They have to learn this along with deconstruction. We have to learn from Derrida the art of deconstructing the self and the other.
Derrida says: “We live in and of difference, that is in hypocrisy, about which Levinas so profoundly says that it is “not only a base contingent defect of man, but the underlying rending of a world attached to both the philosophers and the prophets”” (192). The respect shown for Levinas, the profound thinker is obvious. Derrida does not negate every thought of Levinas. He gives the due where it has to be given.
How do we tackle the hypocrisy in us? Let us remember good old Blake’s question – God, why did you create the tiger along with the lamb? Let us remember the vision of Blake – the gentler animals being protected by the stronger ones. Is such peace possible?
The Jewish question is similar. When we think we are in the Right, are we really sure? What about the contempt we have for others, our fellow people who are different from us? What about the hatred we hide beneath our words? Why are our words different from our thoughts?
Derrida deconstructs the historicity of his thought – the Greek Jewish philosophical discourse: “But who, we? Are we first Jews or first Greeks? And does the strange dialogue between the Jew and the Greek, peace itself, have the form of the absolute, speculative logic of Hegel…?” (192). Is it possible to bring the discourse of peace within a philosophical framework, is the dominant question here. Can there be a dialogue between the self and the other in a peaceful manner? Derridean philosophy aims at complete knowledge of the phenomena. It cannot help, but notice the twinness of human mind, named by various civilizations as Ying Yang and Dwaitham.
Another dominant question of the class room is the nature of existentialism. Is it absurd? Is it negative? What does Sartre talk about? How does he try to tackle the issue of self and the other?
Sartre tries to understand the human configuration: “Every belief is a belief that falls short; one never wholly believes what one believes” (93). Why are we not able to believe what we believe with complete conviction? How does doubt, pessimism enter the mind? Sartre uses a personal language while writing. He uses himself as a model for studying the phenomena. His well known chapter on Bad faith talks about watching ourselves like the other to understand our selves better. We need to observe ourselves self-consciously to understand human mind. When we do not fix Sartre in history, our students may not understand the reasons behind Sartre’s frustration with humanity. A detached mind sees more and understands more. Experience teaches us to be detached.
Can we have complete freedom of will, is Sartre’s question. Do we have enough scope to be what we are and do what we want to do? How far will my freedom affect another’s freedom? Sartre says: “As soon as a freedom other than mine arises confronting me, I begin to exist in a new dimension of being” and he adds when the other come within his vision “it is not a question of my conferring a meaning on brute existents or of accepting responsibility on my own account for the meaning which Others have conferred on certain objects” (545).
We have a particular perception of our nature. Others have a different perception of our nature. The meaning shifts each time we are viewed and reviewed. Do we have the freedom to control these new meanings, new perspectives? Can any one control how he is viewed by the Other?
How can one view the Jew, was the major question of the 20th century westerner. Sartre says: “I do not choose to be for the Other what I am, but I can try to be for myself what I am for the Other, by choosing myself such as I appear to the Other – i.e. by an elective assumption”. We behave according to the expectation of the society and this is what Derrida was referring to as hypocrisy. We wear masks for others hiding real thoughts. He takes the current historical example to explain his stand: “A Jew is not a Jew first in order to be subsequently ashamed or proud”. What do we mean by the word – a Jew? How do we get a certain impression in our mind when we are introduced to this word? What is the social construction which supports the word – Jew? Sartre continues the analysis about the construction of social and personal thought systems. He says: “It is his pride of being a Jew, his shame, his indifference which will reveal to him his being – a – Jew; and this being – a – Jew is nothing outside the free manner of adopting it”(550). The Jew has acquired a high self-consciousness that has become his Being. There is no freedom for the Jew to be just a Person. Human prejudices mark Being and take away the freedom to be just be. Who are We? Just conceptions. The Jew becomes the model for analysis of the phenomena.
We are immensely affected by the perception of others. The Other creates a social structure of opinion. At a point we might even begin to believe it. Who are the real we? Are we just opinions constructed by others? Where is the freedom of human will? This is the essential reality in which we are caught.
In this background of human thoughts we can read Said’s Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. Behind the concept of orientalism and the western ambition, there is also the spread of western democracy and the concept of equality and rationalism. We have to remember the western contribution to the world in empiricism. We have made use of, and are making use of western perceptions. When we train our students to deconstruct Euro- centrism, we also need to train our students to deconstruct the thought why we want to deconstruct Euro- centrism. Derrida’s question – “why the why” – has to be asked. Just as Said says, “The orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture” (2), now the occident has become an integral part of Indian material civilization and culture. There is a strong negotiation happening between the orient and the occident at various levels.
To a large extent, we have to trust the word of the author and take his intended meaning. What is the intention of Derrida will be understood only with a social positioning of his text. Historicity becomes essential for understanding either philosophy or literature. Understanding Sartre’s political activism will help us view him as a humanist.
Pedagogy has to use a methodology where all kinds of meanings are brought out in class rooms – humanistic, new critical, formal, and post structural. A methodology has to be fixed objectively using all tools of reading and evaluating. Literature carries philosophy and ideologies no doubt. It was the sign of high culture in monarchy no doubt. In technological democracy it has multiplied and we need sophisticated philosophical methods to read works with insight no doubt. But how are we going to tackle all this in a class room where minds are not yet mature and grown, is the emerging question among teachers. Literature departments, as they are even now known in India will have to decide a methodology for using reading techniques in class room. Death of literature is not going to promise the ultimate equality though equality is the dream of the human mind. Why do we want to read political meaning into a text has to be understood.
All said and done, among all social sciences, literature gives maximum scope to touch almost all the human problems of the phenomena. Philosophy with its dependency on rationality cannot handle so many aspects of human life. Modern criticism has almost suffocated literature as it carries subjectivity only, and cannot withstand the non-historical philosophical attack. Expecting a writer to rise above his prejudices is expecting the impossible. Even the philosopher has his agenda –an angle of thought – a historicity – an origin of perception.
We do not want the death of criticism in the style of Terry Eagleton. We have to take a wholesome criticism to class that will teach students to get at the various aspects of meaning. In a global mass culture Foucauldian analysis will come handy to them. We can definitely expose them to a Bathesian reading of incidents as signs. But, as teachers we have one more role to do in the class room. Our role should be not only to accentuate the semantic dualism or division in thought, but also to make young minds understand the need to respect the Other. We have to remember that if we teach young minds to read divisions only, it might become a quality of the personal life. They begin to lose faith and begin to doubt every aspect of life. This might breed unrest of mind. This will create more and more divisions in society. We need global peace. Literary criticism and critical theory should move towards this direction. They should help students read texts for getting a complete understanding of the human mind and not stop with a partial one. Academicians and scholars should remember the impact of their theories on people. In our greed for knowledge we should not sacrifice other greater values present in the Word.
Books cited
Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. London: Routledge, 2003.
Said, W. Edward. Orientalism. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2001.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. London: Routledge, 2004.
How do we take this enormous flexibility of meanings to the class room? When this age dismissed the authorial intention as autocratic, what does the teacher do in a classroom for interpreting the text? Or, shall we leave interpretation to the students? Can hermeneutics be practiced in a democratic manner in a class room? When we deal with a text carrying the history of an alien culture, is it possible to ignore the authorial intention completely? These are the Indian questions in a class of students reading English literature.
For instance, how do we take deconstruction to the classroom? The young student thinks he can deconstruct any text and he does it with the ease of a bird flying in the air. He feels all texts are faulty; all writers have political agendas; there is nothing great about great literature; why, there is no great literature; all writings are coloured with materialism; so, why learn anything from it; I am a much better person; I know more than most of these writers; literature is high culture, the sign of hegemony and we have to tear its pretensions.
Reading material meanings alone in literature breeds negative attitude. The young mind is either depressed or becomes too arrogant of itself.
Can we read Derrida from a humanistic perspective? How de we introduce Derrida to our students? Deconstruction is basically a sharp analytical method. Derrida insists on “Why the why?”(166). What could be the intention of the rigorous questioning of Derrida?
Said does not bother about this aspect of the Derridian question. He wants to know why the European academic thought was materialistic. The question in Derridian style would be – why does Said ask these questions? The next question automatically follows – is the thought of Said non-materialistic? When we take Orientalism to the classroom, we need to question it from both ways. That would be a complete deconstruction of the whole thing. Deconstruction not only aims at deconstructing the Other, but also at it’s self.
Derrida searches for a pure language, a pure literature. Metaphors carry human thought – good and evil - light and darkness. How did this division enter the human soul, and thus human language? Can we speak without negativity? The moment we define something as good, automatically something else becomes bad. In desperation Derrida wants to renounce language. He brings our attention to the duality of mind and thought.
Deconstruction can become a method to arrive at self-knowledge. When we understand the evil or the selfishness in our mind, we might accept it in others. We understand that the Being has to survive and it needs certain qualities for self-preservation.
Why does Derrida deconstruct Emmanul Levinas? How does he handle deconstruction?
Levinas moves over to ethics beyond the framework of the supposed to be objective philosophy. That is Derrida’s contention. All the while Derrida has immense respect for Levinas’ question – “Can one respect the Other as Other, and expel negativity?” (142). Technological violence has exposed western intellectuals to the reality of arrogance of the Right. How do we treat people different from us? How should Hitler have treated the Jews who were different from him? The Derridean questions are Jewish questions. Derrida asks: “Are we Jews? Are we Greeks?”(191) the questions are directed at himself, his historicity. He deconstructs his attitudes – his position of thought.
Can there be pure writing or pure thought without historicity? Derrida says that there can be only one writing –“the law of earth”. “All other writings contain the amalgamation of a certain number of age-old truths” (10). “Age old truths”, then, are found in the Word. It is found in the texts of Jews, or Greeks or the British or American or Indian. Writing cannot take place without the presence of age-old truths just as it is materialistic. However divided human thought is, still there is something immense, something healing, soothing in the Word. This is the deep structure of Derridean thought. This thought is there along with his meticulous readings of other texts. This age old truths, found in every literature revives every civilization. This is the role of literature – its contribution to human society.
We have to teach our students to respect this age old truths in literature. They have to learn this along with deconstruction. We have to learn from Derrida the art of deconstructing the self and the other.
Derrida says: “We live in and of difference, that is in hypocrisy, about which Levinas so profoundly says that it is “not only a base contingent defect of man, but the underlying rending of a world attached to both the philosophers and the prophets”” (192). The respect shown for Levinas, the profound thinker is obvious. Derrida does not negate every thought of Levinas. He gives the due where it has to be given.
How do we tackle the hypocrisy in us? Let us remember good old Blake’s question – God, why did you create the tiger along with the lamb? Let us remember the vision of Blake – the gentler animals being protected by the stronger ones. Is such peace possible?
The Jewish question is similar. When we think we are in the Right, are we really sure? What about the contempt we have for others, our fellow people who are different from us? What about the hatred we hide beneath our words? Why are our words different from our thoughts?
Derrida deconstructs the historicity of his thought – the Greek Jewish philosophical discourse: “But who, we? Are we first Jews or first Greeks? And does the strange dialogue between the Jew and the Greek, peace itself, have the form of the absolute, speculative logic of Hegel…?” (192). Is it possible to bring the discourse of peace within a philosophical framework, is the dominant question here. Can there be a dialogue between the self and the other in a peaceful manner? Derridean philosophy aims at complete knowledge of the phenomena. It cannot help, but notice the twinness of human mind, named by various civilizations as Ying Yang and Dwaitham.
Another dominant question of the class room is the nature of existentialism. Is it absurd? Is it negative? What does Sartre talk about? How does he try to tackle the issue of self and the other?
Sartre tries to understand the human configuration: “Every belief is a belief that falls short; one never wholly believes what one believes” (93). Why are we not able to believe what we believe with complete conviction? How does doubt, pessimism enter the mind? Sartre uses a personal language while writing. He uses himself as a model for studying the phenomena. His well known chapter on Bad faith talks about watching ourselves like the other to understand our selves better. We need to observe ourselves self-consciously to understand human mind. When we do not fix Sartre in history, our students may not understand the reasons behind Sartre’s frustration with humanity. A detached mind sees more and understands more. Experience teaches us to be detached.
Can we have complete freedom of will, is Sartre’s question. Do we have enough scope to be what we are and do what we want to do? How far will my freedom affect another’s freedom? Sartre says: “As soon as a freedom other than mine arises confronting me, I begin to exist in a new dimension of being” and he adds when the other come within his vision “it is not a question of my conferring a meaning on brute existents or of accepting responsibility on my own account for the meaning which Others have conferred on certain objects” (545).
We have a particular perception of our nature. Others have a different perception of our nature. The meaning shifts each time we are viewed and reviewed. Do we have the freedom to control these new meanings, new perspectives? Can any one control how he is viewed by the Other?
How can one view the Jew, was the major question of the 20th century westerner. Sartre says: “I do not choose to be for the Other what I am, but I can try to be for myself what I am for the Other, by choosing myself such as I appear to the Other – i.e. by an elective assumption”. We behave according to the expectation of the society and this is what Derrida was referring to as hypocrisy. We wear masks for others hiding real thoughts. He takes the current historical example to explain his stand: “A Jew is not a Jew first in order to be subsequently ashamed or proud”. What do we mean by the word – a Jew? How do we get a certain impression in our mind when we are introduced to this word? What is the social construction which supports the word – Jew? Sartre continues the analysis about the construction of social and personal thought systems. He says: “It is his pride of being a Jew, his shame, his indifference which will reveal to him his being – a – Jew; and this being – a – Jew is nothing outside the free manner of adopting it”(550). The Jew has acquired a high self-consciousness that has become his Being. There is no freedom for the Jew to be just a Person. Human prejudices mark Being and take away the freedom to be just be. Who are We? Just conceptions. The Jew becomes the model for analysis of the phenomena.
We are immensely affected by the perception of others. The Other creates a social structure of opinion. At a point we might even begin to believe it. Who are the real we? Are we just opinions constructed by others? Where is the freedom of human will? This is the essential reality in which we are caught.
In this background of human thoughts we can read Said’s Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism. Behind the concept of orientalism and the western ambition, there is also the spread of western democracy and the concept of equality and rationalism. We have to remember the western contribution to the world in empiricism. We have made use of, and are making use of western perceptions. When we train our students to deconstruct Euro- centrism, we also need to train our students to deconstruct the thought why we want to deconstruct Euro- centrism. Derrida’s question – “why the why” – has to be asked. Just as Said says, “The orient is an integral part of European material civilization and culture” (2), now the occident has become an integral part of Indian material civilization and culture. There is a strong negotiation happening between the orient and the occident at various levels.
To a large extent, we have to trust the word of the author and take his intended meaning. What is the intention of Derrida will be understood only with a social positioning of his text. Historicity becomes essential for understanding either philosophy or literature. Understanding Sartre’s political activism will help us view him as a humanist.
Pedagogy has to use a methodology where all kinds of meanings are brought out in class rooms – humanistic, new critical, formal, and post structural. A methodology has to be fixed objectively using all tools of reading and evaluating. Literature carries philosophy and ideologies no doubt. It was the sign of high culture in monarchy no doubt. In technological democracy it has multiplied and we need sophisticated philosophical methods to read works with insight no doubt. But how are we going to tackle all this in a class room where minds are not yet mature and grown, is the emerging question among teachers. Literature departments, as they are even now known in India will have to decide a methodology for using reading techniques in class room. Death of literature is not going to promise the ultimate equality though equality is the dream of the human mind. Why do we want to read political meaning into a text has to be understood.
All said and done, among all social sciences, literature gives maximum scope to touch almost all the human problems of the phenomena. Philosophy with its dependency on rationality cannot handle so many aspects of human life. Modern criticism has almost suffocated literature as it carries subjectivity only, and cannot withstand the non-historical philosophical attack. Expecting a writer to rise above his prejudices is expecting the impossible. Even the philosopher has his agenda –an angle of thought – a historicity – an origin of perception.
We do not want the death of criticism in the style of Terry Eagleton. We have to take a wholesome criticism to class that will teach students to get at the various aspects of meaning. In a global mass culture Foucauldian analysis will come handy to them. We can definitely expose them to a Bathesian reading of incidents as signs. But, as teachers we have one more role to do in the class room. Our role should be not only to accentuate the semantic dualism or division in thought, but also to make young minds understand the need to respect the Other. We have to remember that if we teach young minds to read divisions only, it might become a quality of the personal life. They begin to lose faith and begin to doubt every aspect of life. This might breed unrest of mind. This will create more and more divisions in society. We need global peace. Literary criticism and critical theory should move towards this direction. They should help students read texts for getting a complete understanding of the human mind and not stop with a partial one. Academicians and scholars should remember the impact of their theories on people. In our greed for knowledge we should not sacrifice other greater values present in the Word.
Books cited
Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. London: Routledge, 2003.
Said, W. Edward. Orientalism. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2001.
Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. London: Routledge, 2004.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.