Noesis - The Online Journal of the Mega Society

My revelation upon sitting down to write this damned albatross -- after so many years of partial successes and generalized failure -- was that the most unquestionably popular and triumphant mode of interdisciplinary thinking is not Hermann Hesse's vision of the Glass Bead Game; nor is it Oswald Spengler's immensely erudite and cross-cultural historical overview in "Decline of the West"; nor even Claude Levi-Strauss's magisterial jaunt across the tropics in his four-volume structural analysis of often quite vulgar and nasty South American myths with all those blatant references to bodily functions. Rather, beyond a doubt, it was the late-night TV monologue. That is to say, the silliness implicit in far-fetched topic-hopping is something one must take very seriously -- which requires "going native" and getting silly oneself!

So: the intentions here are indeed quite serious; the footnotes are very sober, solid, and profoundly interesting, and I guarantee will change your life for the better if you actually read them, provided you do so in precisely the order specified. Of course, there are some prime stinkers in their midst, too, and you never know which are which until you point and shoot. But this, I must insist, is a very responsible academic strategy on my part, since nobody ever reads the damned footnotes anyway, unless you dangle the chance of a joke in their faces! (Think of it as the “lit-crit lottery ticket” trick.)

However, the mode of delivery is . . . silly. And that's intentional and, I assert without proof, completely appropriate and theoretically valid. But the proof of the giggling is in the thinking. (I aim for the reverse of the "Chinese food" effect: it makes you laugh and ask for more while you're reading it, and two hours later your thoughts have gotten so heavy you can't keep your head from listing sideways and rolling against door-frames.)

The matters under discussion being abstract and weighty, a word on how to best facilitate their visualizing might perhaps be well-advised here. This is to be imagined read aloud at a lectern by John Cleese in serious need of shimming (not Cleese, the lectern), with Terry (not-the-American-animator) What's-his-surname turning (and, perhaps on occasion, dropping) the pages while tipsy and mumbling gutterally. There is a quote, for example, from a very notable mathematician concerning the “mysterious unity of all things.” I imagine Cleese stopping in mid-reading to reflect out loud: “Imagine that: ‘of all things'!” The page-turner, dubious, asks: “Of all things?” “Yes! Of all things,” comes the starchy response. Drunken hiccup, followed by a slurred out “Hmmph! Of awwwwwwwl things…” “Oh, of all things!” says Cleese, becoming most annoyed. A little Stanislavky method can go a long way; a lot between two Pythons, though, is what I found myself hallucinating. It became rather painful after a while.

We seek deep concepts by silly means. Think of this, for openers at least, as a cerebral equivalent of a well-known Monty Python skit: welcome to the Ministry of Silly Thoughts.

Silly, from Old English sælig, “happy, innocent, pitiable, feeble,” devolving upon sæl, for “happiness,” related to Latin solari, to console, from the Greek hilaros, “cheerful” (from which, “hilarious” in current parlance, or “Hilary” in the U. S. Senate). Archaic meaning: helpless, weak. Contemporary meanings cluster around two themes: firstly, rustic, plain, derived from the obsolete sense of “lowly in station,” “humble”; secondly, weak in intellect, foolish, or contrary to reason: absurd; trifling; frivolous.

The sociological assumptions that linked these two parcels of sememes historically needn’t be dwelt upon here. But as the peasant is told upon asking which fleeing personage is the King in Monty Python’s “Holy Grail,” “he’s the one what ain’t got shit all over him.” Today we’d likely say, “he’s the one who looked so bloated in that parachutist’s jump-suit with all the sequins and the cape attachment – and I believe he’s left the building and – oh yeah, did I mention this? He’s dead.” It’s from differences in station like this that silliness has its origins.

Essential to easy generation of the “silliness effect” – as in the frivolous juxtaposing of Kings Arthur and Elvis in the last paragraph – is production of collisions between disparate things, which context makes us associate unexpectedly. No one not on drugs or writing late-night standup material would be likely to seek a link between the latest news from robotic interplanetary exploratory vehicles and political upheaval in the Hispanic community in the general vicinity of Miami. But when Elian Gonzales’ mom fled Castro’s regime on a flimsy makeshift boat and died at sea while getting her son to (what she thought would be his) freedom, Jay Leno noted how scientists had just discovered water on the Red Planet, “and in an unrelated story, a boat of Cuban refugees washed up on Mars this morning.”

Aside from late-night comedic unwinding from the day’s events, there is only one other area where such juxtapositions are hunted down and put to use. (No, not dreams: that’s involuntary; and besides, many people today no longer have any.) This area is largely deemed, regardless of lip services paid, “absurd; trifling; frivolous” in academia – when not, that is, subjected to sober attempts at its production which typically display all these three aspects in spite of themselves. This is the domain of what often passes for an oxymoron in our supremely specialized research establishment: interdisciplinary thought. And this, of course, is what we’re here to talk about.

A good sign that we’re getting somewhere would be refining what we’ve assumed so far. “Absurd; trifling; frivolous” are all aspects of silliness, but they differ from each other in significant ways. Freud, for instance, whose revolutionary studies on the unconscious fell between the cracks of accepted disciplines, focused on the absurd: in works on jokes, dreams, and “the psychopathology of everyday life,” the “small change” of tongue-slips, the irrational “kettle logic”[i] of dreamwork, the tension build-up and release mechanism of humor in our psyche’s regulation, were front and center in his investigations. (To go from the absurd to the “uncanny,” as he called it, more properly slides us into the thoughts of his disciple, Carl Jung – which is fine, since we’ll be more interested in him and his “archetypal” thinking anyhow.)

When Dr. Johnson was asked what he thought might make an appropriate topic for a certain antiquarian scholar of his acquaintance, the sense of indulgent contempt implicit in trifling was apparent: “Scarlet breeches,” he deadpanned. This is the attitude, as well, of many people – even scholars – to pure mathematics. It’s an area, said Bertrand Russell, more like theft than honest work, where nobody knows what they’re talking about, and formal certainty correlates with worldly insignificance. But the study of the naturalist’s analogs of “scarlet breeches” – the crack-patterns in dried mud, the stability of beer foam, the fringing of diffraction patterns on shower-stall doors – have led to a revolution in the cross-disciplinary study of nonlinear behaviors: Chaos and Catastrophe are now the names of serious theories. But not so serious that they cannot model the sudden irruptions of belly laughs from small effects, as shown in John Allen Paulos’ Mathematics and Humor.[ii] Moreover, this “straw that broke the camel’s back” logic of the Catastrophic has a deep taxonomic aspect which – to the astonishment of even mathematicians – serves to underwrite finite classification schemes of virtually everything, thereby serving to give proof of what one very unmystical Russian dynamicist, Vladimir Arnol’d, has called “the mysterious unity of all things.”[iii] (This is the so-called “A-D-E Problem” -- as with most results of great value in mathematics, its name seems arbitrary, even . . . trifling: we’ll take it very seriously, though, herein.)

When French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault published a weighty book entitled The Archaeology of Knowledge in 1969, his erstwhile pupil Jacques Derrida responded in four years’ time with The Archaeology of the Frivolous. “Frivolity,” he said therein, “consists in being satisfied with tokens.”[iv] The triumph of structuralism – reducing systems of meaningful activity and thinking to the workings of arbitrary signs – was overly frivolous in this sense, and not frivolous enough in terms of playfulness. (In a truly silly later work called Glas, in which running commentaries on the German philosopher Hegel and the career criminal and playwright Jean Genet are juxtaposed in parallel columns instead of Mars and refugees, Derrida, among other things, contemplates in the Hegelian “column A” the epistemological status of the transcendental as “the system’s vomit”; and he also asks us, in the “B” part, “How could ontology lay hold of a fart?”)[v]

While his life’s work took its starting point in Husserl’s mathematical idealism, and while he never truly lifts anchor from this phenomenological location, Derrida’s “deconstructions” have become progressively more oriented toward decentered studies of marginalia and border effects, or the subversive dominance of infrastructure by the “frills” that frame and ornament it. As a disciple has put it, “The purely relational and mathematical operations of ornament, applied to the conceptual dimension, make irrelevant the notions of proper and figurative meaning.”[vi] Moreover, the sorts of mathematical operations germane to such notions clearly reside in the neighborhood of Catastrophe Theory, since “it deals with the properties of discontinuities directly, without reference to any specific underlying mechanism,” making it “especially appropriate for the study of systems whose inner workings are not known.”[vii]

Derrida’s most familiar “thought experiment” (which is “neither a word nor a concept”[viii]), “différance,” would fuse to the sounded French word’s two distinct senses – to differ or differentiate, and to defer or delay – a visual orthography which is at once improper (the ‘a’ should be an ‘e’) and inaccessible as such to the ear. Such word-gaming to gain leverage and escape premature fixity – in the manner, say, of abstract financial instruments used in trading “futures”[ix] – has affinities with mathematical notions of same vintage, “différance” itself having been seen early on (by Anthony Wilden, for instance[x]) as akin to Catastrophe Theory’s “Cusp” dynamic. (Even better, to the Double Cusp,[xi] as we will see later. But our mathematical crowbar[xii] will prize apart the deconstructive apparatus even more extensively than this, to find the whole of “A-D-E” itself rolled up inside of it.)

Now that the Presidential elections are over with (I write this just weeks after the United States Supreme Court finally settled the incredibly protracted Gore-Bush fiasco, speaking of late-night standup material emanating from Miami), strict enforcers of “equal time” provisions with time on their hands might object that Derrida’s “frivolity” was just given three paragraphs, whereas Freud’s “absurdity” and the “triflings” of Catastrophe Theory were only allotted one paragraph each. There is a good reason for this. It has to do with an old vaudevillian rule concerning how one sets up contexts: for it is our intention in what follows to have Derrida so situated that the pratfall he’ll take from our argumentative banana peel will have maximal effect.

And so, now that we’ve considered the three aspects of silliness, let’s contemplate more closely the three paragraphs devoted to the third, Derridian, silliness aspect, the better to figure out where this discussion will get hijacked to next. Of the three paragraphs, it is the first which is the most explicit in its silliness, and hence contains the greatest likelihood of providing us with cheap laughs while we figure out where we’re going with this argument. Indeed, the notoriously lugubrious Glas contains what amounts to a mission statement for its own frivolity, which it would do us well to contemplate:

This text induces by agglutinating rather than demonstrating, by coupling and decoupling, gluing and ungluing rather than by exhibiting the continuous, and analogical, instructive, suffocating necessity of a discursive rhetoric.[xiii]

The author, in this work and others, frequently speaks of “knowledge effects” (as opposed to knowledge itself), which frequently are spotted traveling in the company of references to collage.[xiv] This particular text suggests a need to tie together disparate themes so severe as to legitimize their arbitrary “slapping together” as a method in its own right. In the words of Cool Hand Luke’s prison guard, “What we have here is a failure to communicate” between disparate realms of discourse which, historically, suggests one of two alternatives to pick from: either we develop tools for crossing over disciplinary boundaries, thereby enabling the desired communication; or, like certain South Sea islanders, our desperate need will be so outmatched by our incapacity to “get it” that we clear fields to simulate airport runways, pull branches off trees to suggest grids of electric and telephone wires whose look and feel we grasp but whose function eludes us, then strip ourselves naked and party hearty while consuming all perishables and await the arrival of the great god Cargo[xv]. (And a Happy New Millennium, while we’re on that topic.)

Reports just released on the status of humanities hiring in American higher education[xvi] make it clear that the proliferation of deconstruction in literature departments has, after a quarter century’s bullishness, led to an unprecedentedly low demand for new hires at the tenure-track (or any other) level: Derrida’s legacy, in other words, spreading like kudzu from its point of infection at Yale, has now prevailed so thoroughly as to almost choke the life out of the literary establishment. We can attribute this to three bankruptcies: moral, intellectual, and (first to be implicated, last to be appreciated) spiritual.

The moral bankruptcy came into clear view in late 1987, when Derrida’s close friend, and America’s most prominent champion of deconstruction, the literary theorist Paul de Man, was revealed to have been a Nazi collaborator in Belgium during some of the lowest moments of the Holocaust, only to flee to Argentina of course, brazenly lie about his past, shed a wife and family under dubious circumstances, claw his way to tenure at Yale, and then show the foresight to die three years prior to all hell breaking loose. Derrida, an Algerian Jew who had received less than kind treatment from occupying Nazis himself as a youth, was clearly embarrassed and wounded, but at least insisted on an open airing. His spin-doctor epigones, however, went ballistic, shrilly twisting facts and showing such a willingness to relativize evil in the name of saving face that one of the people who introduced Derrida to American, Jeffrey Mehlman, speculated on there being “grounds for viewing the whole of deconstruction as a vast amnesty project for the politics of collaboration in France during World War II.”[xvii] (To put things in perspective, the collapse of the junk-bond market and the indictment of Michael Milken came soon after: for the ironic connection between these two series of events, see note 9 above, or search out old “Tonight Show” monologues.)

Intellectual bankruptcy came into view more recently, with the successful springing of one of the greatest academic spoofs in memory. In 1996, a physicist named Alan Sokal published a heavily-footnoted monograph in a major postmodernist journal, Social Text, alleging a “deconstruction” of the physics of quantum gravity. Using all the right jargon, the paper caused a sensation among the meta-theory people, whose chronic innumeracy and dread of hard science was only matched by their parasitical dependence upon the latter’s technologies, to facilitate their mongering of mass-media fare as “literary,” and support their nomadic lifestyle of international conference-hopping. After waiting a while for the applause to taper off, Sokal then revealed that the whole thing had been a put-up job, and that if any of the people cheering the loudest had known enough science to warrant framing an opinion of it, they’d have seen through the ruse in a New York minute.[xviii] The fracas that ensued launched the so-called “Science Wars,” with the ongoing revelation of the incredible ignorance about the things upon which they’ve pontificated making the postmodernist contingent look, if possible, even more foolish – when they don’t seem just plain stupid.

Spiritual bankruptcy was implicit as early as 1966, but remained beneath the academic radar for an interminable period, hinging as it does on a nuance and a moment. The nuance is suggested in a passage cited earlier: that the application of mathematical methods to language-based statements would “make irrelevant the notions of proper and figurative meaning.” This may be true, but is easily misconstrued: for it does not mean the proper and figurative cannot be distinguished in a given context. Quite the contrary, in fact: no less than the creator of Catastrophe Theory, René Thom, argued that its interpretation of an isolated morphogenetic field “leads precisely to a theory of analogy” – thereby offering, “for the first time since Aristotelian Logic, a new way of constructing and interpreting analogies.”[xix] The misconstrual – not only easy to make, but a commonplace in deconstructive circles – also indicates a conflation of the ideal and in-the-world aspects of any object of contemplation, in a manner that contradicts the Husserlian premises upon which Derrida built in the first place, and which he reiterates, in spite of himself, at key junctures throughout his career. It is just this sort of “blind spot[xx],” in fact, which Derrida himself was always wont to hone in on in the theoretical underpinnings of other people’s thinking. As such “turning the tables”[xxi] is so fundamental a tactic in deconstructive practice, what better way to exemplify it than by applying it to itself? (Given the etymology of the noun in the phrase “hoisted with his own petard,” this in fact will help us answer Derrida’s own poser on how ontology could “lay hold of a fart.”)

We now come to the moment: Derrida, a largely unknown quantity, is placed in the pecking order of speakers, at a now-famous 1966 Johns Hopkins conference, in a position fully compatible with his academic status: dead last. The conference is an unofficial coronation ceremony for Claude Lévi-Strauss – the only anthropologist this side of Margaret Meade to be hailed as a world-class celebrity (an honor which, to his credit, he did not seek, or seem to like) – as new king of the hill: his structuralist tactics have vanquished all foes, taking American literary studies by the usual tea-pot tempest. While denizens of San Francisco’s Haight-Asbury district are just beginning to “tune in” to Dr. Timothy Leary’s remote broadcasts from inner space, “turn on” to psychedelics, and “drop out” in droves, Derrida makes a deal with the Devil. (At least, there is no other rational way to explain what happens next.) In a talk fraught with silly possibilities – its title, after all, was “Structure, Sign and Play”[xxii] – and delivered in French, no less, while most folks were already packed and hailing cabs to the airport, he nevertheless managed to persuade a generation that Lévi-Strauss’s famed linchpin motif of the “bricoleur” was wrong-headed fluff, and he could offer better product. (In future, his talks at such conferences would be explicitly requested – when the conferences themselves weren’t invented to accommodate them – and, in the timeless tradition of Mephistophelian bargains, he’d rise ever higher on their ring-card listings.)

Wait! Before those parentheses! A “better product,” you say? Come now, Lévi-Strauss would never shill his thoughts that way; certainly you’re not implying that Derrida would and did? Well, perhaps the Devil made him do it. It is nevertheless indisputable that the poststructuralist world entered into with Derrida’s talk was far more self-conscious of itself in this regard. Consider the American mouthpiece organ of the postmodernists, Diacritics, and in particular the celebrated issue of Winter 1972. This number gained fame within the movement for two big reasons.

First, the cover showed a then-new (now no longer vended) candy, a peanut-butter-flavored bar from Peter Paul called “No Jelly”; this illustration was linked to an inner-back-cover citation from the Ur-Text of the grand-daddy of all structuralisms, the Course in General Linguistics of Fernand de Saussure, which lifting read like this: “In language there are only differences. Even more important: a difference generally implies positive terms between which the difference is set up; but in language there are only differences without positive terms.”

Second big reason: the issue contained a major coup – a transcription of the first-ever interviews with the new superstar of abstract thinking, one Jacques Derrida. And, in the long peroration serving as its introduction, in which the epistemological statuses and semiotic suggestivenesses of the transcription process, introductions, interviews, and overweaning self-indulgences in public forums are all given the Derridian treatment (except for that last item: that’s called wish fulfillment), the author of the “Prolegomenon to Derrida” makes this comment:

And after years of appearing to finesse the question – although the appearance as he says is deceptive – Derrida now chooses to negotiate openly in the Paris marketplace, where nearly everyone has got a newly packaged brand of dialectical materialism to sell (and it is by no means the worst of the available commodities) and where everyone is out to prove in the shrillest tones that he has a product so far to the left of everything else that it makes everything else look like Fascism. What the best of them have, they have bought at one time or another in some form or another from Derrida, but of late they have tended to forget their debt and have been crowding him very hard wanting to know what has he done for them lately.[xxiii]

This passage speaks for itself (and all too blaringly, I can’t help but point out). But note the interesting rhetorical construct that concludes that first long sentence: each brand being hawked is claiming “it makes everything else look like Fascism” (i.e., the opposite of the Brand X in question’s own self-proclaimed position on the left-right political gradient). Given the future history of deconstruction (the Paul de Man affair in particular) there is a retrospective irony to this, of course. But there is much more – a postdictive irony, one might call it, of a special sort. To give the construct a classical-sounding name, we could term it a “factitive metalepsis”; this term, however, will require some explaining, which I’ll get around to eventually. Rather than wait for that to happen, though, we could tag the construct in a manner more telling and au courant right now: as an instance of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s “canonical law of myths” (exemplified in the “jack of all trades” symbol-swapping tactics of the much-maligned “bricoleur”), which law was exemplified by its author in reference to his friend Max Ernst’s invention of collage,[xxiv] and by philosopher-mathematician Jean Petitot in terms of the Catastrophe Theorist’s Double Cusp[xxv].

We are now on the verge of some substantive arguments, which will guide the remainder of the entire discussion (and not just of this first installment). As the postmodernists are wont to say at the placement of each footnote (in which stylistic tactic the way is clearly pointed by Derrida himself in the interview of reference), “The stakes here are enormous.” Indeed, they say this perhaps because of the double entendre implicit in the word “stake”: the pot in gambling, or a post meant for inserting in a hole after digging? (This latter, of course, is suggestive of a sort of “QED-ness envy,” felt by many literary critics with doubtful job prospects, of their tenured fellow faculty members in the Math Department down the hall. (But there is, I’m reminded by an internal interrupt from my intestinal tract, a third – homonymous – signified to be invoked: an enormous, juicy slab of beef would set with me just fine right now, as I am very hungry and have been sitting at my desk in front of this computer screen for much too long. I think I’ll go to lunch now (Don’t worry, the thread of this argument won’t unravel in the interrim. After all, it’s not going anywhere …) … ) … )[xxvi]

[i] While the term “kettle logic” has taken on a life of its own, and first appeared in Freud’s well-known analysis of “Irma” in the 1900 Interpretation of Dreams (Avon: New York, 1965), pp. 152-33, Freud also recycled it to describe the “joke-work” in his 1905 Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (W. W. Norton & Company: New York, 1963, James Strachey, transl.). He relates it in the latter as a “piece of sophistry which has been much laughed over, but whose right to be called a joke might be doubted: A. borrowed a copper kettle from B. and after he had returned it was sued by B. because the kettle now had a big hole in it which made it unusable. His defence was: ‘First, I never borrowed a kettle from B. at all; secondly, the kettle had a hole in it already when I got it from him; and thirdly, I gave him back the kettle undamaged.’ Each one of these defences is valid in itself, but taken together they exclude one another.” (P. 62; returned to in the context of exemplifying the dreamwork on p. 205.)

[ii] John Allen Paulos, Mathematics and Humor (University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 1980) is still a delightful read, with good background on prior attempts at theories of humor, including Freud’s. It does not treat any but the three most elementary catastrophes – Fold, Cusp, and Swallowtail – and so must be deemed introductory: a good “punch-line” dynamic has yet to be articulated. Which is fine, since Paulos also tells us, “in the spirit of Gödel’s theorem (and with considerable looseness), we can state the following: There is no theoretical account of humor that is not itself (on a higher level) somewhat funny and therefore incomplete.” (P. 55)

[iii] V. I. Arnol’d, Catastrophe Theory, Second, Revised and Expanded Edition (Springer-Verlag: Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, Tokyo; 1986), P. 92. The connection between Catastrophe Theory and the A, D, E classification scheme due to Evgenii Dynkin (and stock in trade for particle physicists and other users of Lie algebras) was initially discovered by Arnol’d himself in 1974; it has since grown in scope (including B, C, F, G, and basically all letters in Dynkin and Coxeter’s parallel systems of “alphabet soup”) and richness (few fields are excluded from its reach, and many results in “infinite” or parameter-based classifications can now be pointed to), to become a veritable cottage industry. The key paper (still useful, though dated in parts) is M. Hazewinkel, W. Hesselink, D. Siersma, F. D. Veldkamp, “The ubiquity of Coxeter-Dynkin diagrams (an introduction to the A-D-E problem),” Nieuw Arch. Wisk. 25 (1977), 257-307. More current, and frequently updated, references can be found on Tony Smith’s math/physics website: http://www.innerx.net/~tsmith

[iv] Jacques Derrida, The Archaeology of the Frivolous: Reading Condillac (U. of Nebraska Press: Lincoln and London, 1980; John P. Leavey, Jr., transl.; French original 1973, Editions Galilée, Paris), p. 118. Frivolity, for Condillac (and Derrida reading him) “originates with the sign, or rather with the signifier which, no longer signifying, is no longer a signifier. The empty, void, friable, useless signifier… This frivolity does not accidentally befall the sign. Frivolity is its congenital breach… Since its structure of deviation prohibits frivolity from being or having an origin, frivolity defines all archaeology, condemns it, we could say, to frivolity.” (Compare this to Paulos’ remarks vis à vis Gödel’s Proof in his discussion of theories of humor in note 1.)

[vi] Gregory L. Ulmer, Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (The Johns Hopkins U. Press, Baltimore and London, 1985), pp. 41-2. As discussed on the page prior to the quote’s beginning, “A comparison of E. H. Gombrich’s study of decorative art with Derrida’s op writing reveals that many of the effects Derrida seeks are those inherent in the history of ornament – decorative or parergonal art – of which constructivism and other abstract art movements, as Gombrich explains, are the modern heirs. Derrida’s research into these decorative devices, of course, is a deliberate aspect of his metaphorology, challenging the logocentric prejudice against rhetoric as ornament and showing that ornamentation itself can provide the methodology of a science (grammatology).” But of course, ornamentation in this sense already provides the methodology of a science: particle physics. This is a literal statement of the case: Gombrich specifies that all ornamental symmetries devolve upon the three operations of translation, reflection, and rotation (with the latter, in its turn, as Hamilton first realized, being always expressible as a sequence of two reflections) – but it is just this operational view which is the necessary and sufficient basis for the theory of groups; and, since Emmy Noether’s theorem in the early days of quantum mechanics proved that all conservation laws are expressible as group-theoretic symmetries, all fundamental physics – and above all, all superstring thinking – has become strictly (and only?) “ornamental” in this precise sense.

[viii] Jacques Derrida, “Differance,” in Speech and Phenomena And Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs (Northwestern U. Press: Evanston, 1973; David B. Allison, transl.; French original in Bulletin de la Société française de philosophie, LXII, No. 3 (July-September, 1968), 73-101.), p. 130. What Derrida says différance “is,” is container of “the juncture – rather than the summation – of what has been most decisively inscribed in the thought of what is conveniently called our ‘epoch’: the difference of forces in Nietzsche, Saussure’s principle of semiological difference, differing as the possibility of [neurone] facilitation, impression and delayed effect in Freud, difference as the irreducibility of the trace of the other in Levinas, and the ontic-ontological difference in Heidegger.”

[ix] David Lehman, Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (Poseidon Press: New York, London; 1991), tells the tale of Richard Rand, co-translator of Glas, who sent a letter to the Wall Street Journal in the spring of 1989, “when Michael Milken was slapped with a ninety-eight-count indictment on charges of racketeering and securities fraud.” Rand defended the junk-bond pioneer as a “deconstructive financier,” claiming Milken “is an inventive thinker whose thoughts about capital formation happen to coincide uncannily with Mr. Derrida’s thoughts about concept formation.” This was shown in his turning the junk bond from “a ‘marginal’ (and despised) ‘supplement’ to the overall investment machine” into “a central and dynamic feature.” As Lehman summarizes, “Junk bonds, the apotheosis of the age of greed, are high-risk, high-yield debt securities used to finance corporate takeovers. Isn’t it possible that Derrida and his cronies have aimed at doing something comparable in the academic marketplace, palming off a debased currency of empty ‘signifiers’ for which they nevertheless claim value and prestige?” (Pp. 36-7)

[xi] The Double Cusp, a kind of product of two Cusps, each operating in a different “behavior space” (like Derrida’s visual and audial realms of difference), will have a starring role in all that follows: in 1974, Chris Zeeman, the greatest champion in the English-speaking world of René Thom’s theory, noted how certain of his papers applying Catastrophe Theory to linguistics represented “the first coherent attempt to explain the brain activity behind language.” Meanwhile, “The most interesting key” to the mysteries of language “seems to lie in the study of the paths in the double cusp, and the associated sequences of entrances, exits and transfers between the 4 actors involved [later shown by Callahan to be as many as 5], and the comparison of these paths with Thom’s original classification of basic sentences.” E. C. Zeeman, “Catastrophe Theory: Its Present State and Future Perspectives,” collected as Chapter 21 in Catastrophe Theory: Selected Papers 1972-1977 (Addison-Wesley: Reading MA, 1977), 630, 632. James Callahan’s suite of later papers provided a stunningly graphical navigational interface to the Double Cusp’s full 10-dimensional geometry and, collaborating with psychiatrist Jerome Sashin, applied it to modeling emotional affect response. (We will cite these frequently enough later on.) Lévi-Strauss’s “canonical law of myths” has been appropriated by it (along with the “semiotic square” of Algirdas Greimas, etc.) by Thom’s pupil Jean Petitot in another series of papers we’ll investigate. Its links to fundamental questions of physics and the mysteries of higher-dimensional analogs of imaginary numbers called Sedenions, where the Dirac Equation lives and “divisors of zero” frolic, is a major topic in this author’s own recent monograph, “The 42 Assessors and the Box-Kites they fly,” appearing in the January 2001 Perfection, and available from the Los Alamos science archive at http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/math.GM/0011260. Finally, building on analysis contained in the latter, we will see later on that Derrida’s last-mentioned mode of difference, to be collected at the juncture “différance” contains – Heidegger’s “ontic-ontological difference,” or the passage from beings to Being – can be modeled quite directly by considering the “cross-ratio invariance” of the Double Cusp’s mysterious “parameter,” in the light of half-a-millennium-old insights of Nicholas of Cusa concerning the optical illusionism of trompe d’oeil painting. And that’s just for starters . . .

[xii] Peculiarly, the “crowbar” is a seminal image in the thinking of both Catastrophe Theorists and deconstructionists, for no good reason that I can come up with beyond the obvious, namely, it happens to describe what they’re doing quite handily. “Leverage” and “defective cornerstones” figure prominently in Derrida’s own writings, as well as in those of his unfortunate cohort Paul de Man, of whose ignominy I’ll have more to say later on. In a classic text by Robert Gilmore, meanwhile, Catastrophe Theory for Scientists and Engineers (John Wiley: New York, 1981), the “crowbar principle” – of sticking your prizing tool into a “measure-zero” hole, then twisting it around until you’ve tweaked out the substructure of the singularity in question – is discussed at length, and even informs a chapter title.

[xiv] Ulmer, op. cit.: “The effectiveness of collage is that, like metaphor, the piece, displaced into a new context, retains associations with its former context. The two operations constituting the collage technique – selection and combination – are the operations characteristic of all speaking and writing. Moreover, as in language usage, the operations are carried out on preformed material…. In fact, given that the collage in general is the most characteristic mode of composition in the modernist arts and that Derrida is the first to develop fully a theory (epithymics) that conceptualizes this mode, it is fair to say that Derrida’s grammatology is to collage what Aristotle’s poetics was to Greek tragedy. The comparison is also a contrast, since decomposition (deconstruction extended from a mode of criticism to a mode of composition) as a practice relies on the very elements Aristotle excluded from metaphor – articulation and the homonym.” (P. 59) These remarks become ironic when collaged with those we’ll make about Lévi-Strauss’s (earlier, more mathematically appropriable) theory of collage in relation to the workings of mythic thought, whose operations are also “carried out on preformed material.”

[xvi] I read about this somewhere in a recent newspaper article while waiting my turn for a haircut; I know it was while waiting to get a haircut, as I never buy newspapers unless Roger Clemens or Pedro Martinez pitched a masterpiece the night before, or something of comparable urgency has transpired, and the baseball season’s over by December; but damned if I remember when and where it was I read about it. Does this really matter to you? Why? Are you tired of asking people if they’d like fries with that, Professor?

[xviii] Alan D. Sokal, “Transgressing the boundaries: Toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity,” Social Text, 46/7, 217-252. The revelation of the spoof, and the cynical view of then-current “meta-theory” that led him to concoct it in the first place, came in Sokal’s “A physicist experiments with cultural studies,” Lingua Franca, 6(4) (May/June 1996), 62-64. See, too, his “Transgressing the boundaries: An afterword," Dissent, 43(4) (Fall 1996), 93-99; and, “Pourquoi j’ai écrit ma parodie,” Le monde (31 janvier 1997), 14. Finally, see his “What the Social Text affair does and does not prove,” in Noretta Koertge, ed., A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodernist Myths About Science (Oxford U. Press: New York, 1998). Sokal, meanwhile, collaborated with Jean Bricmont to bring the argument into the lair of the beast, publishing his scathing indictment of the major postmodernists in France as Impostures intellectuelles (Editions Odile Jacob: Paris, 1997). This author can report that foreign-language bookstores in Cambridge, Massachusetts in the backyard of Harvard experienced unusually brisk sales in this text before its late 1998 translation into English as Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science. As the New York Times book reviewer put it, “When Sokal and Bricmont expose Jacques Lacan's ignorant misuse of topology, or Julia Kristeva's of set theory, or Luce Irigaray's of fluid mechanics, or Jean Baudrillard's of non-Euclidean geometry, they are on safe ground; it is all too clear that these virtuosi are babbling.”

[xix] René Thom, “The Two-Fold Way of Catastrophe Theory,” in A. Dold and B. Eckmann, ed., Structural Stability, the Theory of Catastrophes, and Applications in the Sciences: Battelle Seattle Research Center 1975, Lecture Notes in Mathematics 525 (Springer-Verlag: Berlin, Heidelberg, New York; 1976), p. 250. Interestingly, the Aristotelian instance Thom cites on the following page is the same used by Derrida himself in a comparably seminal locale: see the famous essay “White Mythology,” collected in Derrida’s Margins of Philosophy (U. of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1982; Alan Bass, transl.), p. 242.

[xxi] The rhetorical term for the effect is “chiasmus,” first self-consciously employed by a philosopher in Karl Marx’s title The Poverty of Philosophy, which applied the device to a prior title of Proudhon’s, The Philosophy of Poverty. Its most ironic deployment, however, is doubtless in the working out of Paul de Man’s legacy: as Lehman, op. cit., puts it, “A further irony was that the publication in America of de Man’s wartime journalism – in 1989, long after the publication of de Man’s deconstructive writings – had the effect of making the early seem late, of reversing their order of priority. What had happened was the biographical equivalent of a chiasmus – the rhetorical figure in which the elements of a sentence occur in a crisscrossing pattern. To appreciate the irony, you need to understand that the chiasmus was a trope greatly favored by de Man and his fellow deconstructionists, who invest it with considerable significance [where it] serves to describe a working procedure – a way of instantly turning the tables. What else is the characteristic deconstructive project – “the reversal of binary oppositions” – but the movement of a chiasmus? And now, with the belated discovery of de Man’s wartime writings, you had an unexpected new illustration of the trope. The writing he had done first was read last – and compelled a retrospective reassessment of everything he had written in the interval.” (P. 159)

[xxii] “La structure, le signe et le jeu dans le discours des science humaines” was delivered October 21, 1966, at the International Colloquium on Critical Languages and the Sciences of Man, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore; the English translation is collected in Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (U. of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1978; Alan Bass, transl.) as Chapter 10, where the full title is rendered this way: “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.”

[xxiv] Claude Lévi-Strauss, The View From Afar (U. of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1992; Joachim Neugroschel and Phoebe Hoss, transl.; 1983 French original Le Regard éloigné from Librairie Plon, Paris), Chapter 19: “A Meditative Painter” (pp. 243-7) develops the theme of the origin of his “canonical law” from discussions over the years with Max Ernst concerning the workings of collage, and specifically references Ernst’s famous collagist “Gedanken experiment,” the juxtaposition of sewing machine and umbrella on a surgeon’s operating table.

[xxv] J. Petitot, “Approche morphodynamique de la formule canonique du mythe,” l’Homme, 106-7, 1988, pp. 24-50. Petitot was inspired not by the original formulation from the famous essay on “The Structural Study of Myth,” to which cryptic shorthanding Lévi-Strauss always claimed he had ever been true; rather, he was taken with the much later book, The Jealous Potter, (U. of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1988; Bénédicte Chorier, transl.; 1985 French original, Librairie Plon) in which the anthropologist for once decided to devote himself at length to making his “canonical formula” understandable. In his later work from Librairie Plon of 1991, The Story of Lynx (U. of Chicago Press: Chicago, 1995; Catherine Tihanyi, transl.), he indicates he not only has read Petitot’s monograph, but cites it approvingly. As he says in the footnote wherein he pays his acknowledgements, “When I proposed this formula for the first time in 1955 (Structural Anthropology, p. 224) it was shrugged off, but during these last few years, it has been met with interest and used in various applications ranging from rural architecture to the Cogito.” (P. 104)

[xxvi] To be continued… Note, by the way, the clever manner in which this initial installment trails off, like a Phil Spector fade-out from the “wall of sound” era of Motown – an effect which, in the classical rhetoric postmodernists preferred to immerse themselves in in lieu of mathematics and other useful things with steep learning curves, would be referred to the figure of aposiopesis. (I’ll bet you can’t pronounce that. Few people can. I can.) And note, as well, the especially clever “signature effect” of the triple ellipses in the nested parentheses: signifying, firstly, the three sillinesses, then the three bankruptcies, and finally, the three variants on stake / steak, all “rounded off” by the right-handed parenthesis signs, in turn signifying the three critical references to intestinal distresses – two due to Derrida’s “ontological concerns” (another rhetorical figure there: that’s “euphemism,” as I’m sure I needn’t tell you – which apparent “occupatio” is perhaps my nigglingly noisome way of insinuating an “apophasis” at your expense … as if you’d know the difference! – which sententious figure (and it’s not a “simile” you idiot!) in turn threatens to continue this propagation of self-referentiality until we have on display, if not a full-fledged “cacozelia,” at least an “amplificatio” run amok, and over which, to indulge in “cataplexis,” I’m beginning to fear I will no longer have control … ), and one due to the internal urgencies experienced by this author. Damned clever, I’d say.