I wasn't a fan of Derrida's work when I first encountered it
I found the language pedantic and unnecessarily difficult
That was a problem, because I kept encountering his legacy in the references of others
That legacy proved persistently valuable.
When he died I felt compelled to write something about that legacy
So here I am
For what its worth, I'm a bit of an empirical oddball in this group
I have done, and continue to do, experiments, archival data analysis, and other quantitative work
Such was never Derrida's style
He was an analyst/theoretician in the tradition of Plato
Asking questions and dialogging about the possibilities
Taking on basic questions and essential theoretical vocabulary
But with a big difference:
he profoundly believed
that one could not observe with precision
and not change that which was observed
This assertion is fundamental to the "false assumptions" he associates with traditional ways of reading
that language is capable of expressing ideas without changing them
that writing is secondary to speech
that the author of a text is the source of its meaning
Derrida, in asserting that these assumptions are wrong, moves literary analysis in directions that others are moving in within other fields
Quantum mechanics had already long asserted that the act of observing changes in the physical world of quantum particles has an effect on what which is observed
McLuhan and Ong were writing already asserting, with their notions of secondary orality, that writing had become primary and speech secondary
Phenomenology and other traditions already asserted that meaning resides in the consumer of texts rather than the creator of texts
Godel had already observed that, at least within mathematics, it was not possible to create a theoretical system that that was entirely internally consistent
Semiotics had already noticed that signs and texts had multiple layers of meaning, not all of which could be fully defined within the context of a dictionary
Derrida catches, in some sense, an emerging Gestault of our time and asks a fundamental question raised in the intersection of these ideas:
"What does it mean to "mean"
Hence his method, "Deconstruction", which attempts to take texts apart and understand them from a variety of perspectives
"Con"-text: A text is not just a collection of words. It is a system that creates meaning in the intersection of that collection. It is both a collection of meanings and a context that reshapes those meanings.
history: every text comes from somewhere, but many of the sources associated with a texts are forgotten, repressed, marginalized or legitimized. In this sense a text is like a person. We forget most of what we learn when we are young. Texts forget too.
linkage: every texts is, in some sense, "hyperlinked" to a whole constellation of other texts
radical reader-oriented criticism: meaning does not reside in the creator of texts. It resides in the consumer. The creator works to shape the meanings that a consumer will take away from the text, but the text takes on its own life, in the hands of consumers, as soon as it leaves the authors hands.
Deconstruction seeks to give voice to each of these perspectives
The result is a "theory of relativity" for literature that asserts that a text's meanings emerge from and evolve within several sources
The observers or consumers of texts
The history of the text, especially in prior texts
The linkages to and from the text
The context created by the text
But the bottom line of his observations is simple
When we push too hard on the meaning of things, meaning falls apart
But when we don't we are deluding ourselves with a false sense of a consistency that isn't really there
The legacy of Derrida's observation's is measurable and substantial
Over 500 dissertations that treat his work as a primary subject
Citations in over 14,000 articles
But the true measure of Derrida remains to be seen
For most of his output, writing really has been secondary to orality
Interviews, in which a favored graduate student got to write a book with Derrida's name on it
Those interviews are highly scattered in their content
For me, the valuable nuggets have been observations about "time" that have been scattered across a number of volumes.
But his observations touch on many core theoretical issues associated with the study of media and media content
Almost all of the citations I've seen for Derrida involve these scattered nuggets
Which raises questions about his ultimate legacy
Will Derrida be better known for
enunciation of a set of problematic assumptions which many continue to make
outlining a method - Deconstruction - that allows us to get inside those assumptions
as a pedantic and difficult to understand writer
or as someone who comments broadly, but usefully, on some basic issues of literary criticism in scattered dialogues
Unless otherwise noted, the contents of this page
were written by participants on the Media Space Wiki, operated by Davis Foulger,
and should be cited accordingly. For example (APA): Foulger, D. and other
participants. (April 23, 2011). Derridas Dialogues. MediaSpaceWiki. Retrieved on from
http://evolutionarymedia.com/wiki.htm?DerridasDialogues.
MediaSpace Wiki