On Description, Or Beyond the Linguistic Turn, Post-scriptum

[This is a post-script to a series of posts. For earlier posts, see here.]

It may be said that in what has preceded, we have in fact simply played the deconstructionist game, played with words, and not really moved beyond the linguistic turn, that it was all slight of hand. Now, of course it was slight of hand. But let us be clear about what we have just done.

Philosophy is the shift from practice to the meta-, the moment of reflexivity, it is the practice of raising the question of what we are doing in practice. Such a move always produces loss but also gain, loss of the immediacy of the original practice, but new perspective. The presuppositions, constitutive outsides of the practice are revealed by means of the creation of new ones, and in fact, the former and latter are in fact two sides of the same.

Deconstruction is the name of the destructive part of this gesture, just as description is the name of the constructive part. Destruction and creation, two sides of life. In between, there are moments of practice, moments in which there is no thought as to the meta, and these are moments of certainty, or at least, relative certainty. If this certainty is too strong, we have apodicticism and paranoia, while if this certainty is too weak, we deconstruct without reconstructing. Descriptivism is certainty in the process of description, that which allows for interplay between creation and destruction, description and deconstruction, by means and through a sly descriptivist application of apodicticity, if according to its own terms.

For whenever deconstruction destroys, we must not lose sight of the fact that it also produces. The deconstructive gesture operates by means of a shifting of the terrain, and this new terrain is produced only by means of the destruction of the old. Each deconstruction has its own presuppositions, and these do not merely lurk there, but are also created each time a deconstruction is performed. In this sense, deconstruction is a creative act, if one which often cloaks itself. Likewise, description is also destructive, if in a cloaked manner. Descriptivism is the process, however, which works to bring them together in a manner which works.

Language, which has been at the forefront of so many deconstructive assaults on the apodictic, is not the end all and be all of deconstruction, though as the medium in which philosophy is generally performed, it has a privileged relation to the meta- of philosophical practice. And language is little other than the creative destruction of an elsewhere. For the deitic gesture, the indicative of the pointing finger, “I am talking about that,” is itself as destructive as it is creative, for it destroys the finger to the extent it creates the “that” in question. So it is with any philosophy. Philosophy is the reflection on a practice. In reflecting, it turns the practice into an object for thought, destroys the immediacy, the surety of that practice, even as it creates the immediacy and surety in its own practice as philosophy.

We have simply shifted our terrain, and in the process, creatively destroyed our own foundations. We have used a slight of hand to shift the terms of the game. Philosophy has never benn anything but, nor self-reflection, nor language. We string words together in a sentence, each one partially obliterating the ones before it while creating new meanings for them in the process. We keep speaking to creatively destroy what we have already said. We change the terrain of our arguments to creatively destroy new ways of acting in the world.

So it should come as no surprise that in my own description of descriptivism, I kept changing terrain. At each jump, I creatively destroyed the last, showing the ways in which descriptivism could relate to a variety of contexts, how it unravelled in those contexts, and in relation to the creative unravelling of other terms like apodicticism and deconstruction. But I didn’t relate it explicitely to other terms, like dog or cabbage or mustard or steel. Descriptivism relates much better to apodicticism and deconstruction, to philosophy and reflexivity, than to salt or wood or stone. While I could’ve tied descriptivism to these more concrete terms, there is more distance, more labor is required, more stretching to do. And this distance between terms creates gradations, terrains, forces, attractions. Each deconstruction is like a topographical intervention, a leveling of a particular hill in a landscape, yet one which always gives rise to a hill somewhere else, for the terrain is simply the flip side, the moebius strip-like refraction, of the act of walking.

That is, the descriptions and unravellings are always specific, always situated, and the particulars of the situation provide traction, force, and movement. Each metaphor is related by gradation to some over others, wood is closer to tree than it is to stone or Immanuel Kant. Deconstruction is always local, and so is creation. One never ends up without something to stand on so long as one keeps speaking.

For in fact, I always choose to deconstruct a particular term over others in a given discursive situation. Those which I deconstruct provide space in a discourse which is always already being filled by others. The terrain moves under our feet. That which I do not deconstruct, namely, the words I use to do the deconstructing, provide the scaffolding for what remains, and the grounds for the next round of creative destruction.

Which is why the issue with deconstruction isn’t so much language, but rather, of faith. Deconstructionists are creators who have lost a degree of faith in the potential of the world to create itself anew, just as apodictics are those who are scared of the potential of the world to create itself anew. Descriptivists, on the contrary, keep saying yes to the creative powers of life, they have faith in description, enough to describe again, and then to describe again yet again. Having faith in description means not being overly attached to any, it means being ok with swimming in a constantly fluid domain.

Of course, life gives us little choice but to swim in such fluidity, life is fluid whether we like it or not. Deconstruction and apodicticity are means of defense against a game we must play whether we like it or not. And in this sense, deconstruction and apodicticity are always already forms of description, but they are in a sense less honest about what they do. For the apodictic constantly redescribes their justifications for what appear to be the same descriptions of the world, but underneath the appearance of stasis, all is actually continually having to modify itself in the effort to remain the same in changing circumstances. Likewise, deconstruction continually must deconstruct the new forms of description which come its way as the world changes.

We are all descriptivists, in this sense, anyway. And yet the apodictic and the deconstructionist waste so much time and energy, the first creating defenses against new creation, and the second destroying them the second it has created them.

Descriptivism, however, has its eye on sync. Sync with itself, with the world, and with its own self-redescription in its process. Sync conserves as much of creation as is possible, for it creates and destroys in the name of creation. And of course it can always already be destroyed from within. The question isn’t whether or not you can unravell it from within. The question is in how you play the game.

And game it is. Life, language, they are all a slight of hand, a continual pulling out of the rug beneath our own feet. This is time, change, becoming, saying, doing. But it’s all in how you play the game.

And how slowly. In the time between the saying and the unravelling, metaphor gives rise to the new via description. Metaphor, always nested, networked, into specific relations in a specific topography in a specific terrain. Which move do you make, and how fast or how slow, in a give region? Which way do you shift the gradients, which way do you push or pull yourself in given situation.

Your move.

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~ by chris on March 29, 2011.