American Born Chinese

After I read the NYT article discussing a screen adaptation of a Gene Luen Yang's classic graphic novel, I thought I'd investigate the problem of bringing his drawings to life.  Sure enough, as the article mentions, it's pretty hard to imagine how anyone could play the novel's offensively "fresh off the boat" Chinese character Chin-Kee in 2023.  Nor is it easy to envision how to deal with the fantastic plot thread of the kung-fu fighting Monkey King.  I guess we'll have to wait for the show to see how it panned out.  Of course, both these elements fit seamlessly alongside the more realistic portrayal of Jin Wang in the context of a graphic novel.  These three main threads come together in an unexpected climax that makes for a thoughtful and heartwarming reflection on coming to terms with an outsider identity.

Of Grammatology Part 1

So, my hand forced by the previous postscript, I read some Derrida.  This post covers only the introduction and Part 1 of his magnum opus ... because I don't plan on reading Part 2.  While there are certainly some interesting ideas and suggestive passages to be found here, it turns out the Tasic's reconstruction of what Derrida might mean was significantly more interesting than Derrida himself.  Frankly, as a magnum opera go, this one is pretty embarrassing.  Derrida is quite simply a terrible writer.  He produces a constant stream of run on sentences, fragments, and ambiguous grammatical references, all stitched together by rat's nest of parentheses, semicolons and dashes.  In addition, both the whole book, and the individual pieces that comprise Part 1, are poorly organized mashups of loosely related thoughts that originally appeared as separate articles.  It's like watching him throw spaghetti at a wall to see what sticks.  I found his basic idea intelligible only because I am already familiar with several superior versions of it.  So I sympathize with most folks who just consider this word salad.  Of course, all of these critiques can be written off by Derrida and his admirers as the mere kvetching of us reactionary simpletons who have yet to break free of the demand a logocentric metaphysics-of-presence makes for authoritative and linear writing -- a writing that might mean something, that might speak with the voice of the author, that might proceed without simultaneously crossing itself out, putting itself "sous rature", like a man who first paints himself into a corner and then (his graphomania unsatisfiable) goes on to paint right over himself.  

Kvetching aside though, I might as well get what I came for and try to relate the interesting bits to Tasic, Deleuze, and this idea of the 'structure of emptiness' that I've been pursuing.  It's actually possible to state Derrida's main idea in a straightforward fashion.  Normally, we assume that writing is to speaking as speaking is to thinking.  That is, first we think the thought in some sort of interior subjective space, which we are aware of as a sort of pre-linguistic voice in our head.  Then we articulate that thought by speaking aloud, using the sound of language to communicate it.  And finally, much later, we might make some marks on paper or screen that represent the spoken sound.  This allows someone else to come along and 'breath life' into those marks again once we're long gone, and hear our thoughts as if we were right there speaking to them.  Our traditional understanding of this chain of events imagines that nothing essential is lost in this process of double translation.  The assumption is that if we use our language carefully we can perfectly represent the original pure idea that we had in our heads in spoken language, and that, since written language in turn perfectly represents the spoken language, we are able to transfer this idea intact to the mind of another at whatever remove of space or time.  In short, we assume that the signs we use in language are representational.  Derrida's idea is that this is simply not true, that language isn't representational, and that the double analogy between speech and phonetic writing leads us astray.  In fact, Derrida takes this observation a step further and suggests that it is precisely this mistaken analogy that gets us into trouble to begin with.  Our common sense understanding of the way phonetic (alphabetic) writing relates to spoken language works as the ur-analogy for our very concept of representation.  We assume that writing makes a past object (the speaking voice) present again in symbolic form.  To accurately and truthfully bring something that's not 'really' here into the present by means of some fixed sign is what representation means to us.  Our underlying assumption is that to be real is to be present, and that to truly know the real is to re-present it in some transparent fashion.  The 'naturalness' of phonetic writing's re-presentation, the way it seems to almost magically restore a lost origin, encourages us to forget about the whole complicated process that we summarize with the word "representation" and all the assumptions that go into it.  As a result, we tend to take for granted both the essential reality (meaning) of the origin, as well as our ability to faithfully restore (communicate) it through signs.  By contrast, Derrida wants to show us that this origin is a kind of myth, a thing that can never be restored because it was not there to begin with.  And that therefore our signs don't refer to it as the signified but only to other signs, which refer to yet other signs ... ad infinitum.  

I believe that brief summary does justice to Derrida's core idea.  We could certainly flesh it out by relating it to predecessors such as Nietzsche's notion that there are no facts, only interpretations, or Heidegger's idea that Being essentially withdrawals, or Freud's observation that repressed content returns in distorted form.  This is what the translator's long and somewhat wanky preface attempts to do.  Instead, I've chosen to state the idea as a critique of representational thinking because that's one of the main themes of Difference & Repetition.  Deleuze's nearly contemporary account of the same basic post-structuralist idea is so much more carefully constructed and thorough that it's a puzzle to me how Derrida could ever have become the poster child of postmodernity.  The problem with representational thinking is that it is always tries to replace a series of differences with a repetition of identity.  Instead, Delueze invites us to think of difference in-itself, prior to identity, and then to think of repetition for-itself, not as the repetition of some particular identity, but as the always ongoing process by which difference produces more difference, or differentiates itself.  Derrida's deconstruction of writing provides another analogy for this structure.  With writing, the original identity of the idea or meaning or object is missing.  The author-itative voice is gone.  What we get instead are patterns of differences -- marks on paper that refer to phonic marks that refer to experiential marks that refer to ... Each of these systems of marks is constituted by differences between the marks it uses (letter, phonemes, and as we'll see, time).  And the way differences propagate from one system to the next is what allows them to be coupled in the structure we usually call "representation".  Derrida spends most of his time discussing the impossibility of an original identity while simultaneously bemoaning our inability to escape from the craving for this "transcendental signifier" that would ground the whole chain of differences of differences.  Deleuze simply gets on with showing how this concept of identity came to be produced.  Derrida is right that the chain of differences doesn't begin with an identity, but since he inherits Heidegger's nostalgic obsession with questions of origin, he doesn't seem to clearly see that something like identity can be produced at the end of the chain, as a limit, a simulacrum.  Of course, this identity isn't the final end of the chain, or some transcendental telos, but a coupling or resonance that kicks off a new round of differentiation.  

I'm sure others have written more and more eloquently on the similarities and contrasts between Deleuze and Derrida.  But I think I've read enough to get a sense of whether Derrida is, for me, worth pursuing further.  Deconstruction seems to me a last ditch effort to resurrect the Hegelian dialectic.  Only this time, the alpha and omega of the scheme are the absence, rather than the presence, of absolute Spirit.