Power: Interpersonal, Organizational, and Global Dimensions Wednesday, 30 November 2005 TOPIC: Professional authority and cultural hegemony continued: Deconstruction and postmodern/ post/structuralism. II. Second example, reading. Gary Peller – “Reason and the Mob” shows how hegemony works • tries to lay bare for the reader a lot of things usually hidden and esoteric • tries to show that the difference between reason/sentiment, truth/myth, mind/body, knowledge/superstition are deeply embedded in our culture and are taken for granted, a culture that is itself a product of the Enlightenment period - beginning in 16th century continuing for several centuries - about creating the 'light' of reason/ truth/knowledge. (Note: labels for historic periods, processes are creations after the fact by observers/ scholars.) • the text begins with a stream of consciousness depiction of the moment when we come to believe the dominant Enlightenment teaching of the aforementioned dichotomies – Peller argues that the distinction between each of these is a political process, with social hierarchies attached to different sides of each pair Peller offers a deconstructivist argument, in which he takes apart that which has been layered, that which we take for granted and don’t notice. Further, he tries to show how oppositions are buried in texts, oppositions that constitute uncritical values, assumptions. We cannot separate knowledge and truth from the action of constructing it – knowledge/truth is made, all attempts to represent a truth work through a medium/method. All representation has to have a medium and a method – Peller discusses the one embedded in language and writing. All of our methods of representation have biases – they are not without politics, there is interest and social action.  His argument is that there is “no objective reference point separate from culture and politics” (p. 29). Science, economics, philosophy – all are 'texts' (malleable human creations), to be read and interpreted. What has been presented as knowledge/truth/objectivism/reason are actually the effects of a particular form of social power, the victory of a particular way of representing the world that presents itself beyond interpretation but as (unvarnished, unconstructed, transcendent) truth itself. If what separates the rational from the irrational is the claim that the rational approach is able to purify itself of ideology and mere social conventionality, the deconstructionist wants to challenge reason on its own ground and demonstrate that what gets called reason and knowledge is simply a particular way of organizing perception, communication, a way of organizing and categorizing experience that is social and contingent but whose socially constructed nature and contingency have been suppressed. When the particular way that knowledge and legitimacy have been organized is rejected, the traditionalists see an abyss of meaning, and therefore charge that the deconstructive stance is “nihilist.” (Peller 1985: 30) Peller wants to show the politics behind our systems of knowledge. On p. 30, Peller presents a paragraph by a professor of religion at UVA who is writing about deconstruction and why he believes it has created a crisis in humanistic studies. Here, Peller unpacks another author’s critique. 11/30/05, page 1 of 11deconstruction = unpack embedded assumptions, binaries Deconstruction has become a style/ism: post-modernism (a style) vs. post-modernity (a social formation, a mode of society, particular organization) In “Reason and the Mob: The Politics of Representation,” Gary Peller dissects Nathan Scott’s argument. He presents a paragraph by Scott that he proceeds to deconstruct. Here is Scott’s paragraph: Today of course, the enterprising anti-humanism of the post-Structuralist movement is in full tide, and it presents us with the great example in contemporary intellectual life of the new trahison des clercs. This phrase forms the title of a once famous book by the French critic Julien Benda, which was first published in 1927, and in English the phrase is best rendered as the “betrayal of the intellectuals” .... [Benda] was moved to advance the rather extravagant charge that the typical intellectuals of the modern period identifying themselves with class rancor and nationalist sentient have abdicated their true calling in the interests of political passion: instead of quelling the mob and beckoning it toward true community, they have joined the mob, concurring in its lust for quick results and adopting its devotion to the pragmatic and the expedient.... And it is his fiercely reproachful term that appears now to be the appropriate epithet for the intellectual insurgency that is currently sowing a profound disorder in the...humanities. (Peller quoting Scott 1985: 30) hall of mirrors Gary Peller is arguing that all knowledge embeds claims of power, illustrating by deconstructing Scott’s text which claims to be knowledge (about other scholar's knowledge practices). Scott’s text about crisis in knowledge Scott is right about the “profound disorder sown in the humanities” in the 1980s, and this persists today, (local e.g. plan to change the GIRs, the SHASS requirements in particular. Most professors were brought up during the “intellectual insurgency” – many remain opposed to notion of ‘core’ courses, deny a core that is not a political/cultural construction.) Peller says Scott’s paragraph embeds binary oppositions: • mob: disorder + desire, passion, rancor, sentiment, lustful, immediate, pragmatic, insurgency, expedient • intellectual: order + reason, dispassion, neutrality, discipline, ideal, long-term What are the unarticulated assumptions? Peller says what is hiding is that the mob characteristics are those of animals, while those of intellectuals are human characteristics. Reason is equated with the delaying of desire, with discipline and control. The meaning of a text is slippery! Reason is supposed to “quell” the mob – this is associated with power and coercion, even though Scott doesn’t say acknowledge that. Scott wants it to be neutral, yet he wants to “quell” the mob. How do you do that? By discipline, control, force, coercion? Reason regulates power, 11/30/05, page 2 of 11reason can trump power, regulates passion – it’s a technology of control. If