Intentionism: A Response to Deconstructionism

Jason Peterson
(Copyright 2006)

Jacques Derrida came into the spotlight in the field of literary criticism during a time when tradition, classification, and human ego were at the foreground of critical theory, yet just coming under a sizable backlash from rising critics against the lack of perspective and significance of such theories. In his attempt to preserve the poignancy of the new critics and advance their views into a final, more complete and undeniable form, Derrida offered up his theory of Deconstruction. While his ideas are often permissible and succinct, it has come to my attention that his conclusions about the nature of language do not only contradict their premises, as so many other critics of Derrida have pointed out, but there seems to be something missing from his arguments which has allowed for these conclusions to arise. In the course of this essay I intend to provide evidence of the inherent flaws in Deconstructionism, and by filling in the gaps of Derrida’s arguments, bring to light a new theory of literary criticism that I will refer to as Intentionism.

Derrida argues that words (signifiers) are not representational of objects, subjects, occurrences, conditions, or anything existing in the world (signified). Furthermore, words are not representational of concepts or ideas of the mind, and therefore hold no attachment to even personal meaning. Simply put, words do not represent or signify anything but themselves. His explanation is that, as words can have such a variety of meaning, and those meanings can change through time without adhering to any particular rules, compounded by the fact that the worldly or conceptual things we think we’re talking about when we speak or write can themselves appear vastly different from one person to the next due to personal interpretation (and even physical perceptual defects/differences), they become arbitrary labels and thus lose all meaning except for what other people assume. Then, to explain how people do seem to communicate successfully, he says that it is mere convention resulting from the utilization of binary oppositions, meaning that whatever term we come up with carries within that term an understanding of the negation of the term. This allows us to be in the vicinity, perhaps, of the right assumption to make of a term as we have an idea of what it is not. Of course, Derrida pushes this farther when he claims that sometimes binary oppositions can switch places on the wheel of assumed meaning, so even this method of trying to understand one another fails to give us any real evidence for a signifier-signified connection.

One of the most popular ways to apply a Deconstructive analysis to a text is to point out the places where one statement contradicts another statement, whereupon it supposedly devalues and disproves itself. Finding contradiction through the use of varied interpretation is a strong tool of logical discredition. However, if this is an acceptable Deconstructive method, should it not be equally pertainable to the very writings of Deconstructive rhetoric? Derrida says that, as speech and writing are binary opposites of the speaker’s presence and absence respectively, writing must come before speech in importance because it would be the purer form of the supposed signifiers, due to it’s repeatability and lack of pronunciation flaws. Yet, as pointed out earlier, he has already attested that binary opposites cannot be static or absolute as they can switch meaning, which means necessarily that neither opposite can have more importance than the other. Does this mean that Deconstructionism disproves itself? Cky J. Carrigan, doctor of theology, reflects these sentiments in his essay “Jacques Derrida, Deconstructionism & Postmodernism” when he states that “Derrida could not explain his method clearly without violating the chief principles of his thinking, or without demonstrating that his thinking was wrong headed.”

Another more radical problem concerning the Deconstructive lack of relationship between words and personal meaning is the concept of time. If we do not have a personal understanding of “time” or share that meaning with others, how is it that we all seem to live in the same cause-and-effect reality? Wouldn’t this suggest that time, as a meaningless word with no relation to any concept, is also purely relative, mandating that no particular order of words should be given any more importance over any other order? Then how is Deconstructive rhetoric to be made sense of at all? I would not really be talking about anything here, and I should have nothing to argue in the first place. Much to the contrary, I believe the fact that I can argue about this is evidence that there is something lacking in the current manifestation of Deconstructionism, and these examples will aid in the understanding of Intentionism as I begin to introduce and explain the concept of intention, and the necessity and benefit of contradictions in language.

Another critic of Derrida, Cynthia Chase of Cornell University, points out in her essay “Double Take. Reading De Man and Derrida Writing on Tropes” that Derrida is especially keen on metaphor as it is such a prime example of how any phrase or choice of words can come to mean just about anything. Her response is that we do find meaning in metaphor, sometimes more specific than the meaning of non-metaphoric statements, and that this underlying meaning is impossible to bury in the metaphor. I would have to agree, and add that metaphors would not be metaphors or recognizable as such if they did not hold that underlying meaning. This forwards my case in showing not that words have no signified meaning, only that different words or combinations of words can have the same meaning. This jump from recognizing that the meanings of words can change, to believing that words have no meaning, is precisely the “gap” in Derrida’s argument that I want to address.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, “intention” is defined as “An aim, purpose, or goal that guides action; an objective.” It is my belief, and perhaps a self-evident one, that all forms of communication are the results of actions originally guided by intention: namely the intention to communicate or express oneself, keeping in mind the term expression posits a necessary audience whereby it becomes another form of communication. Derrida seems to wholly ignore the existence of intentions when speaking about language, not to say he would fully disagree with their existence, but that acknowledging them would not be to his benefit. To accept that people speak and write about things to other people for reasons of their own understandings (that they act on their intentions of attempting to bring about a desired effect in the world outside themselves by using words/sounds/grammatics) is to accept that the words people use hold personal meaning for them, and are thus not arbitrary as Derrida suggests. Not to parse the point with amusements, but I would like to mention that another definition of “intention” is “The process by which a wound heals,” as I would like to think the wounds in Derrida’s arguments might be healed by applying Intentionism.

Intentions can be traced back much further than texts and even words, and I will go as far as to say that neither could’ve come into existence without intention. First, let’s consider the animal kingdom. Through evolution (or adaptation for those non-believers) animals have gained many attributes that have aided them in preserving their lives, one largely common attribute being that of vocalization. Dogs, for instance, scare off competitors with their strong barkings, they express anger and the will to quarrel with their growls, when they’re in pain they yelp, and when they have been dominated or frightened they whimper. It is a language they use to communicate – to express their intentions, the music of emotion if you will. To consider these verbal actions mere reflex or instinct only aids my argument, as it would demonstrate their naturally inherent and universal meanings. But to cover all territory let’s assume that they are learned behaviors, learned languages.

A Darwinian approach might suggest that those animals that don’t understand what growling means will be eaten, those who don’t know how to growl will not be able to scare off competitors. This would certainly help to stabilize a common language, but again, I want to go a step further and say that there is a whole realm of tone and body language that accompanies every sound, and that intentions are made clear through the combination of these (perhaps even with some qualities of conscious interaction yet to be discovered/defined), that whether a lion’s roar or a dog’s bark, there is a resonation of intention that allows the audience to know that these animals do not want them to be present. For those who don’t subscribe to the existence of conscious intentionality in animals, let’s get back to humans.

The beginnings of human language came from sounds and pictures. Many of the oldest texts in the world, cuneiform tablets, are written in a language of etchings that resemble the shape of their subjects. Through time and the migration of cultures, these shapes were purposefully made simpler or more extravagant until they no longer resembled the shape of their original objects/subjects, thus ceasing to be pictures and becoming letters, words, or syllables. (This can be found by following the paths of cultures migrating East of Mesopotamia into the Indus Valley, North into Europe, and West into Egypt and Africa.) It is also recorded in these old tablets that speech was more common than texts, so there must’ve been sounds associated with the pictures/words. For the cultures to make sense of their verbal interactions, they had to at least decide on a common sound that would be associated with the particular pictures. It could’ve began as simply as with the animals, people recognizing what sounds they instinctually made when in pain or awe, or crying, or laughing, and then being able to recognize that same sound in other people. This could explain personal meaning. But the decision of someone along the way to make a certain sound for a certain thing (picture, object, subject, occurrence, condition, etc.) combined with the acceptance and usage of that sound in context by other people, this is how common meaning is derived. I have to agree with Derrida that these sounds could’ve sounded like anything. The choice of sound is not important, it is the understanding of the intention of the sound that becomes common, which allows words to change over time without spoiling the ability to communicate.

When we talk about text, it is a form of verbal language and has, built into it, the complexities of verbal speech. Here, the sounds become pictures, tone becomes grammar, and body language becomes context. We should be, and are capable of recognizing the intention behind a text just as easily as we can recognize a growl or our own tears. The key to this is to simply consider the ramifications of institutions of education.

An institution is basically a community: a group of people with a common interest or location, under common governance or with common goals. Education, in this context, refers to the language that all members of a community have been taught and have agreed to use. So, an institution of education refers to any community that functions under a specific establishment of language use (which is every community). These specific establishments can be as lax as a particular language (English, French, etc.) or a combination of them, or as stringent as a secret code language between two children. A person could use one language set at work, another at home, another at church, another at college, and another in a foreign country, and that person would simultaneously belong to all of these institutions of education.

If Derrida’s point is to say that words have no meaning because “gift” in English means “poison” in German, or because “fly” means “exceptional” in some circles of slang, I must accuse him of ignoring the fact that it is a conscious decision for everyone to accept the meaning of a word that is presented to them, or conversely, to try to get others to accept their own personal meanings of words. Of course, even if a I succeeded in getting everyone at my work to call the price-gun a “flagger,” by no means does this imply that everyone at church will know what I mean when I tell them I had problems with the “flagger” at work, and I can know this by seeing how confused people look when I talk about it. The point is, when introduced to an institution of education, people must learn what words mean by coming to understand the intentions behind their use, whether spoken or written, in context to that institution. Where language seems to fail is in the initial intermingling of two previously separated institutions, but the confusion that will arise from communication attempts between these two will always point out the fact that there is a misunderstanding of intentions, in which case more education is required to breach the gap. The “limitless interpretation” of words that Derrida speaks of is a reckless generalization about the infinite potential of use of those words. No single person holds this limitlessness. We all have as many interpretations of words as the amount of institutions of education that we belong to, and no more.

The chief arguments that Derrida puts forth are his issue with language analysis being treated as “logocentric” and his claim that any attempt to give language absolute meaning will only lead to “contradictions, denials, and dogmatic degrees.” Taking what I’ve been discussing here into account, I will now analyze these claims with a fresh vigor. First of all, there is nothing wrong with adhering to dogmatic degrees if the degrees are not in err, and since language is always based on intention as I have shown, there is no err in basing theory on this premise, so let’s continue.

By “logocentric” Derrida means (as far as I can sort out of his constant doublespeak) that language and literature analysis has been biased in the past because we as humans have a habit of looking at everything through a personal human viewpoint (naturally structuralist in nature), so the things we believe about experience, we push onto the world and others and assume that they see things the same way as we do, and since we all do this, it should give us all the illusion that we live in the same reality. However, if we really all did this, there could be no institutions because there could be no common ground, and language would distort exponentially into chaos. My response is, of course we’re logocentric, and we have to be. How would we attempt to understand other humans, or even ourselves, if we did not investigate these matters with a human perspective? But more importantly, it is this firm belief in our own perspectives and personal meanings that allows us to see differences in that of other people, not ignore them. Furthermore, it is only through these differences that we can come to understand or learn about others, thereby gaining commonality between ourselves and other people – which brings me to the “necessity of contradiction” I touched on earlier.

Derrida says contradictions and denials are what prove literature to be nonsensical because we can’t know what anyone else truly means by their words. The only way this would be possible is if we never recognized when things didn’t make sense to us – if instead we took every word to mean what we thought it meant and accepted the jumbled result as successful communication. Much to the contrary, the human mind has a keen ability to detect scramblings and nonsense. When we think we hear somebody wrong, we will make an issue of it and ask. When we see a puzzle piece jammed into the wrong spot, we will remove it and try to find its rightful place. When we see a contradiction in philosophy, we believe that author’s thinking is wrong and it bothers us – hence the existence of the term hypocrite.

What I want to advance here is that the differences, scramblings, and contradictions we encounter in literature/language are the only tools we have to recognize that there is a misunderstanding of intention behind the use of our language, and only when we recognize the misunderstanding are we able to allow ourselves to be educated in the language set of a new institution, which gives us a new meaning behind the words we use to add to our repertoire, and thus a broader and more agile understanding of more people. There is a dual nature to difference, as it proves separation and yet fuels mergence at the same time. When I hear someone say something that makes no sense to me, it is not because the words are meaningless, it’s only because the intentions behind the words are misunderstood due to a difference of institution that is self-evident, and some effort and expansion in the form of education will be required to clarify the situation and acquire the very real commonality of meaning between us that, as humans, we naturally desire and enjoy sharing.

Putting Intentionism into practical critical application, if you want to understand a text for the purposes of evaluation, you must familiarize yourself with as many as you can of the institutions of education that the author belonged to. This way you will better know the intentions behind the use of the author’s words and grammar because you will have put the text in its most accurate context. If the text does not make sense to you, you are misunderstanding the intentions of the author, and so you must further educate yourself in the rules of the appropriate yet-unfamiliar institutions.


BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Dobie, Ann B. “Deconstruction.” Theory into Practice: An Introduction to Literary Criticism. Thomson Learning, 2002.

Derrida, Jacques . “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.”

Criticism: Major Statements, 4th edition. Kaplan, Charles & Anderson, William Davis ed. Bedford/St. Martin’s 2000.

Chase, Cynthia. “Legacies of Paul de Man: Double-Take. Reading De Man and Derrida Writing on Tropes.” Praxis Series: Romanitc Circles. Fraistat, Neil gen. ed. http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/deman/chase/chase.html

Carrigan, Cky J. “Jacques Derrida: Deconstructionism & Postmodernism.” Ontruth.com, April 1996. http://ontruth.com/derrida.html

“intention.” The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th edition. Pickett, Joseph P. et al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.