Jim Beggs

English 956
Prof. Lingyan Yang

Derrida wrote about ethnography and the “discourse[s] of the human sciences” because it
rose to a position of privilege because of the decentering of European culture that took place
simultaneously in multiple fields. European culture was “forced to stop considering itself as the
culture of reference. This moment is not first and foremost a moment of philosophical or
scientific discourse. It is also a moment which is political, economic, technical, and so forth.”
The decentering of European culture and the rise of ethnology are complementary moments,
which require one another to take place. The shift in understanding cultures through ethnology
was also linked with semiotics and the pervasiveness of structuralism in the human sciences. I
really think that the idea of “turning the page on philosophy” or “western metaphysics” is really
problematic, but I suppose there is at least a start in it in what he calls “bricolage.” Derrida wrote
that the bricoleur uses whatever is at hand, and he identified Freud, Neitzsche, and Heidegger as
bricoleurs. I am most familiar with Nietzsche, and in my understanding, he viciously attacked
the biases of western metaphysics, yet finally acknowledged the limited ability to “break” with
tradition from which he made his critiques. He differed from Marx in that respect, who sought
the total transformation of society. In the example of Levi Strauss, Derrida showed the limits of
totalization—that no one could produce an exhaustive catalog of myths, or uncover the origins of
myths because they are a kind of bricolage. Presence is always elided, as is meaning, because we
only understanding things through differences. Derrida proposed “differance” as the point of
origin for all differences.
As much as Jameson tried to disavow moralizing on the postmodern, I got the impression
he disapproved of it for aesthetic and political reasons. He said that the historicism of the
postmodern was “at least compatible with addiction—with a whole historically original
consumers' appetite for a world transformed into sheer images of itself and for pseudo-events and
'spectacles.'” The purpose of postmodern art is to sate consumer's appetites, whose tastes have
been formed under the hegemony of multinational capital. Those tastes are superficial and can
only be satisfied in a limited way. I thought Jameson saw the bourgeois nostalgia for the past as
problematic because it could whitewash the real human suffering that took place. For instance,
many people consider Abe Lincoln the “great emancipator” although he was quite controversial
in his own time. He even suspended habeas corpus, a right often used to differentiate the
superiority of the United States from other countries, during the civil war. However, Hutcheon
saw the postmodern project as a more productive rewriting of history, in its use of pastiche or
parody.
I really enjoyed Hutcheon's piece as she more adequately illustrated her examples than
many of the previous theorists. I had to mostly guess what they were talking about. I don't think
she had any “big moments” like Foucault, but I like her suggestions that poetics should seek to be
positioned within theory and practice. The contradictory postmodern texts, then, could open up
the space where “they can actually use the invasive culture industry to challenge its own
commodification processes from within.” I'm still thinking about what Jameson meant by
technology is not really the “ultimately determining instance” of our cultural production, but
instead stands in for something even deeper. He wrote that “as throughout class history, the
underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror.” I think the blood is currently flowing
from the Third World and the Middle East, and I wondered why Jameson did not expand on his
dramatic statement?