From Pauline Rosenau’s, Post-Modernism and the Social Science:
“Linguistic meaning, always personal and idiosyncratic, can never be communicated from one person to another. Language has a will and power all its own. It generates meaning quite independently of human agency or will. There are no precise meanings for words, no definitive versions of a text; in short, no simple truths. Human institutions are all predicated on ‘the lie that is the word’”
And:
“Post-modern truth is, then, necessarily fragmentary, discontinuous, and changiing. It is rhetorical and aesthetic, associated with experiencing art, and as such it is constantly reconstructed and ultimately linked to death, just as all art is destined to disappear.”
Rationalists often deconstruct post-modernists [how’s that for irony] by noting how they take linear conceptions of reality/truth and tie them into subjunctive knots. Every “knot” then becomes merely a particular context that we all interpret—and then untie and retie—in our own uniquely different ways.
And I agree with the rationalists. Or, rather, I agree with them that, all too often, post-modernists who profess to be effortlessly deconstructing our world fail to differentiate and distinguish points of view that are impeccably linear from those that can never be. In other words, there are contexts and then there are contexts. Some cannot be deconstructed because, quite simply, they refelct the objective nature of the world around us. Thus when relativists say, “we do not see the world around us the way it is but the way we are”, this does not apply to, say, the interaction of hydrogen and oxygen to form water. We can’t say, “Well, you may think water consists of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen but I think it consists of 12 parts carbon to 4 parts helium.”
So, again, it is not whether deconstruction is right or wrong…but when it is right or wrong. It is, in other words, a matter of distinguishing contexts in which it is more rather than less pertinent.
randall patrick
