Just had a few thoughts about class today:
Samantha raised the point that in order for Conrad to destabilize a certain (European) perception of the cannibals, he nevertheless had to appeal to and represent precisely the notion of cannibal that he wants to write against. This is an example of what the philosopher Jacques Derrida finds paradigmatic of language: the experience of the aporia, where it must be structurally necessary for concepts to engage in a critique and destruction of themselves, by opening up possibilities of contestation and interdeterminacies that nevertheless remain intrinsic to the very notion of the "purity" of the concept itself. The charge of Conrad "ventriloquising" African subjects can also be read in this light: in order not to ventriloquise, he must still ventriloquise: language must remain forever open and inadequate to itself, even though it tries to close down this "something undecided" about it.
Deconstruction then goes beyond a simple "destabilizing" quality of the binaries that the group presented about in class. To see the real significance of this breaking down of binaries is to see that our binaries are not and never originary; it is to see that it is on the basis of an originary indeterminacy that these binaries are even allowed to appear in the first place. They are effects of an interminable "play" that allows meanings to disseminate, come into being and contest each other. This then opens up possibilities for readings to challenge what we (or English civilization) have always taken as natural: if everything was set in stone, there would never be anything left for us to do to change what had been given to us.
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2 comments:
i'm not sure if our intention was to accuse Conrad of ventriloquism; rather the opposite: that because he did not give the Africans a voice, that he opens himself up to charges of objectification by Achebe. The implication was that one must choose between one or the other, a rock and a hard place, so to speak.
the suggestion that our group used the terms "deconstruction" and "destabilisation" somewhat loosely is well taken, though. it does raise the subsequent question of which did Conrad achieve, if any, at all.
Precisely; i'm saying that if he did, then the enterprise will look self-contradictory; but yet this it the way it has to be, if in Derridean terms, it is to function at all.
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