Yesterday I went to my first orchestra concert in Japan. It was held at Mie University in a very nice hall. I went because one guy I know from church was playing cello in it. I was surprised because he started playing cello less than a year ago, but he played a piece that seemed very hard.
It was a great concert that reminded me of why pre-20th century music is so good. As I was listening, a Mariah Carey song popped into my head, and it seemed disgustingly poppish, void of meaning. Classical music usually has conflict and a message. Most messages in modern music I can think of are messages of the meaninglessness that comes with deconstructionism (by the way, deconstructionism was a dead end. We learned some things, but now let's get back to constructionism), or some kind of goofy foundationless happiness. Those are the only two modern messages I can think of (obviously, "baby, baby, baby, hey baby, I love you baby baby, baby" doesn't count as a message).
But I think I was way too focused as I listened. Perhaps to the point of becoming tense. Concerts are too long to be listened to with that kind of intensity. I had the same kind of feeling as I would get if I ate a big bag of hard candy: A little is nice, but I think this is an overdose. There was a constant stream of non-repetative (thank goodness) music coming from up to 60 instruments at once. I should have dozed off like many other people there. hehe.
posted by Stephen @ 1/24/2005 09:52:00 AM
7 Comments:
AMEN to "down with deconstructionism" [shakes fist at evil class last semester!] Yeah, it has some good points, but I use those to balance my constructive view of the world. :) If we were all deconstructionists the whole world would stop with people too scared to leave their houses or take another step for fear of making a wrong choice. We'd be philosophizing until we died on the spot.
And lovely description of the musical concert. May I ask the name of the composer??? I'm definitely going to hit more concerts this semester. Music feeds the soul.
And hey, why do I feel like the only one posting comments on this site anyways???
-Laura S. ;)
There seems to be a lot of unwaranted abuse of "deconstructionism" going on here, but I'll avoid opening that can of worms on your site. (Perhaps another time and place...) It sounds like the concert was a good, if over-taxing, experience. I think one of the advantages of full orchestral scores lies in our inability to take it all in at once. There's something humbling and uplifting about it all at once.
I also wanted to tell you that I like the new layout of the SAHV site, and this seemed as good a place as any.
Hahaha, no I think decontructionism's time is up. It's like we have taken apart our societal VCR, and it was good because we learned about all these parts, even if we don't know exactly how all these parts work. But now it's time to re-assemble the VCR and pop in "The Scarlet Pimpernel".
I agree about orchestra concerts being great for their inability to be fully picked apart in one sitting. I should have relaxed a little more and let the incomprehensibility wash over me. hehehe.
Are you sure you know what the term means? I don't want to sound condescending, but this is one of those words that gets tossed around like gummy bears on an ice cream bar, so it often gets used for things that have nothing to do with Derrida's concept. Your beautiful vignette about "God wouldn't", for example, is incredibly close to "deconstructionism" for someone who thinks it's a meaningless dead end.
It's true that I don't have my mind totally wrapped around the term (kind of like 'post-modernism'). What do you think about the following definition pulled from Dictionary.com? Is it fair or is it a gummy bear definition? It may not be how Derrida defined it. A definition:
A philosophical movement and theory of literary criticism that questions traditional assumptions about certainty, identity, and truth; asserts that words can only refer to other words; and attempts to demonstrate how statements about any text subvert their own meanings: “In deconstruction, the critic claims there is no meaning to be found in the actual text, but only in the various, often mutually irreconcilable, ‘virtual texts’ constructed by readers in their search for meaning” (Rebecca Goldstein).
I didn't say that deconstructionism IS meaningless, but that it can LEAD to meaninglessness (and it has for many people). So maybe I should say that insofar as it LEADS to meaninglessness, it's a dead end. And I think people apply deconstructionism not only to film and literature, but to life as well, so it might be a pop-culture definition that I'm using, and not Derrida's. Tell me what you think, and thanks for dialoging.
Hey Steve, sorry I haven't replied in while: I've been on a crazy training schedule for my new job. Well, here goes a little more dialogue:
OK. As for the definition given above, there isn't anything flagrantly wrong with it, BUT anyone who takes deconstruction seriously is going to be skeptical of such a short summation. This is part of what makes deconstruction notoriously difficult to define. (Derrida and Caputo co-authored a book called "Deconstruction in a Nutshell": it is 215 pages long.) I will throw a couple of ideas out for you to think about, and hopefully they will give you a good idea about the spirit of "deconstructionism".
First, deconstruction is not a method that we practice, it is a phenomenon that be observe. I do not deconstruct a text; texts deconstruct. Every text eventually deconstructs itself: this is not meant as a negative or cynical observation, it's just what texts do. As Derrida said, "Deconstruction happens; it happens."
Second, deconstruction happens because texts are constructed things. A text is like a fabric: there are a multitude of meanings woven together into a text. Each concept and sentence and even word is connected to other concepts/sentences/words both inside and outside of the text we are concerned with here. Many of these linguistic and ideological connections are like loose threads that can pull and unravel (deconstruct) the picture of totality presented by the text. This doesn't mean that texts are meaningless, but it does mean that they are not absolute.
In order to get at the meaning of a text, we readers must play at tracing the various threads of meaning throughout the text, risking, as Derrida says, getting our fingers caught in the process. As such, the only methodology required by a "deconstructionist" is a careful and charitable reading of the text. We do not try to take the text apart; we simply try to do the best possible job of reading. It just so happens that when texts are examined with this level of scrutiny, their loose ends tend to begin unraveling and we observe the phenomenon of deconstruction. A text is not invalidated just because it deconstructs (as a text, that is simply what it does), but because they tend to deconstruct, texts do not have eternal and unchanging centers of meaning. We have to continue playing at interpretation.
All texts share a certain level of connection. Every useage of the word "free" affects and is affected by every other useage of the same word. Thus, texts influence one another and form a delicate but unbreakable web of connections.
I hope it will be clear from what I said above that reading and writing are not separate and distinct actions. Reading and writing presuppose and include one another: in order to write, one must be reading meanings of your words in and through other texts, and in order to read, one must re-write the text. Construction and Deconstruction continue endlessly in the life of a text. Thus, deconstruction is better thought of as oppossed to destruction than opposed to construction.
OK, I wrote rather a lot there (more than I originally intended), but I hope that it begins to open up the meaning of the term "Deconstruction". I hope you see why I don't think of it as being at all pessimistic or meaningless. I suppose that, yes, it can lead to meaninglessness, but only in as much as LIFE can lead to meaninglessness. I think real the danger of dissilussion lies in expecting to find certain and unchanging meaning in texts that simply cannot support such a concept of truth. Treating texts AS TEXTS leads to an appreciation of the meaning they can communicate to us.
Let me know what you think! And, of course, thanks for dialouging...
(or "dialoging" if you don't like my British spelling...)
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