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Language, power, and play: The dance ofdeconstruction and practical wisdomJames N. Laditka aa Assistant Professor of English , Mohawk Valley Community College ,Published online: 21 May 2009.

To cite this article: James N. Laditka (1991) Language, power, and play: The dance of deconstruction and practical wisdom,Rhetoric Review, 9:2, 298-311, DOI: 10.1080/07350199109388935

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JAMES N. LADITKAMohawk Valley Community College

Language, Power, and Play:The Dance of Deconstruction and Practical Wisdom

Some colleagues at my college and I have recently worked to refresh ourteaching through "theory." While a few in our department, like many in Composi-tion elsewhere, voice their skepticism openly, most of us are at least willing toconsider the possibility that our practice might be improved through an under-standing of current trends in rhetoric, semiotics, feminism, Marxism, and otherapproaches to understanding our world that lend themselves to theoretical ways ofknowing. It seems clear from recent gatherings of the 4Cs that my local colleaguesand I are not alone; we in Composition now find ourselves asking more often towhat extent the theory of recent decades might present suggestions or imperativesfor change in our teaching.

But why ask of theory what might be its implications for changes in ourpractice? Why, indeed, should we not rather interrogate theory from the perspec-tive of our daily experience as teachers, celebrating what Stephen M. North hascalled our Practitioner's "lore," our private knowledge of what seems to work inthe day-to-day of our classrooms? Certainly, we should maintain a critical perspec-tive as we consider any proposal for significant alterations to our practice, par-ticularly since most of us now recognize that any theory is in the end often littlemore than elaborate rationalization, a play of power upholding the world-view ofsome individual or group. In our practitioners' role, we who teach Compositionsurely gain some vital insight over the years into what "works" with our students,and any theory must necessarily pass our tests for reasonableness in light of thatexperience.

Yet there is also something to be said for framing our investigation the otherway around, asking what theory has to say to practice. Louise Wetherbee Phelps,for example, has written persuasively about the importance of theory for successfulteaching. While praxis "disciplines" theory, she writes, it cannot dominate therelationship. Bringing theory into practice helps us to make "manifest novel andunanticipated meanings within future situations" ("Toward a Human Science"233). Perhaps more importantly, the variety of perspectives that open to us throughtheory can enable us to reconceive our understanding of current practice, toredescribe experience and point to new ways of being and doing (229). I am notcertain of the mechanism, the process, but I believe that my teaching has improvedthrough the years, and I think there is a relationship between that improvement and

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my professional reading—including these investigations of theory. It may be thatthe checks of theory have to some extent helped me to avoid in my teaching acharacteristic difficulty identified by North: We practitioners tend to mature to astate of "practical inertia," where we are sometimes blinded to the ineffectivenessof mismatching problems and solutions in novel situations. One reason many ofus have continued to enjoy working in Composition is precisely the daily infusionof novelty, and in this atmosphere of continual change we all can recognize inourselves and our colleagues evidence of this not-so-practical "practical inertia"from time to time (on "Practitioners" see North 21-55). So, in our practitioner roleswe need to remain open to the possibility that we may find insights of value in thework of theorists and researchers, from whatever disciplinary context they mayappear (see Lauer).

My intent here is not to translate na'ively and uncritically some currentcanonicals of theory into teaching but to explore a possible "reading" of one aspectof current theory, to scout what might be helpful there for developing newperspectives on our teaching practice. So I do not intend to invoke these voicesfrom theory for their connection with some source, some truth. Rather, it is thesevoices which hold sway in an important corner of our professional discourse at themoment, and thus it seems we should examine their perspectives for the possibilitythat they may offer something of value to our individual practice. Most important-ly, those in ascendance among our theorists play a role in deciding who is accordedthe right to speak in our profession and the way in which their voices are received;and eventually—it is in many cases a process of years, to be sure—all of thisprofessional discourse begins to play a role in the way students are taught. So Ibelieve we have an ongoing obligation to interrogate theory to discern its implica-tions for our teaching.

Wondering/Wandering in the Postmodern Problematic

William Covino's "revisionist return to the history of rhetoric," The Art ofWondering, represents one trend in theory that raises some interesting questionsfor teachers of Composition. It seems to me that there is enough of importance inCovino's work and in the perspective it represents that its implications deserve tobe considered with some care. This is my purpose here.

Covino invites us to celebrate counterinduction, to break the rules of reason.Basing his work on the science philosophy of Paul Feyerabend, Derrida'sdeconstruction, and the social anthropology of Clifford Geertz, Covino asks us toforsake any search for truth, to establish alternative worlds, to find or invent newconceptual systems that suspend or clash with those which seem to us mostplausible, to introduce "perceptions that cannot form part of the existing perceptualworld" (Feyerabend 32). In this vision for Composition, we are to eschew "com-municative efficiency," privileging always the ambiguity that Covino finds in thelikes of Plato, Montaigne, and Byron. While I am not certain that we should or can

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ever fulfill this vision of deconstruction in our classrooms—or, for that matter, inour own thought—I am interested here to at least explore some possibilities whichmight accrue if we were to attempt to teach a Composition based on this art ofwondering.

Have Covino and the deconstructionists wandered too far from the security ofhome and logos, our Western tradition of rationalism? Certainly, some of ourcolleagues believe that they have—and a far greater number who will probably notread Covino and the others would likely share this skepticism. Yet The Art ofWondering raises important questions for educators. One of Covino's sources,Feyerabend's "anarchistic theory of knowledge," for example, proposes a clear andinviting education agenda: "A mature citizen," Feyerabend asserts, is not one whohas been instructed in "a special ideology, such as Puritanism, or criticalrationalism," carrying this ideology with her "like a mental tumor"; rather, amature citizen is a person who has learned how to make up her own mind (307-08).Yet this mature citizen we might hope to nurture in a Composition classroommodeled on Covino's art would necessarily recognize that all of her decisions mustalways remain tentative, provisional, contaminated. She would recognize, withClifford Geertz, that there are no "neutral" perspectives from which we might viewour world with objectivity, that there are no transcendent truths that we might cometo know. The foundationalism that grounds humanism, that search for first causesand secure truths that is premised on the agency of autonomous authors/subjects—all of this we are to thrust from our windows. We are to side, then, with DavidHume's skepticism: Since "whatever is, may not be," we are advised to privilegenothing, or, what amounts to nearly the same for our practice, to privilege every-thing equally. The difficulty here, of course, is the possibility that we may end ina state of philosophical quackery, unproductive for the student writer—whetherwe consider her preparation for the academy or whether, more important, we lookto her development as a critical consciousness, an ethical actor in a political worldof contingency and exigency. For here we have the postmodern problematic, whatJean-François Lyotard calls our "incredulity toward metanarratives" (xxiv). Nolonger can we believe in the stability and locatedness of home; now, perforce, wemust wander.

The later Heidegger is a similar voice with considerable currency in the realmof theory these days, especially as he is read in Heidegger's Estrangements, astunning recent interpretation by Gerald L. Bruns. Heidegger, like Covino, wouldhave us "wander into the strange" in our thinking, rather than establish ourselvesin the understandable. As Bruns reads Heidegger, "[r]epose is not in the nature ofthinking." Instead of "dwelling," thinking should "wander in the between." Poetryand thinking, while not the same, share this characteristic of waywardness. Theymove,

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endlessly disseminated, exposed to "anarchic multiplicity," uncon-tainable, not to be defined as so many standpoints or positions oravenues of approach, never able to succeed to a final point or ultimateachievement: pointless—but now this word has to be used in a dif-ferent sense, not according to customary usage, because "withoutwhy" does not mean idle nonsense (which is how the philosopher nowand always dismisses the poet). The point is to get thinking as well aspoetry out from under the question of point. (183)

Thinking in this way is not at all what our students usually have in mind. Theycommonly prefer "the golden world where everything is harmonious and safe."For that matter, thinking in this way is also not at all what most of our colleagueshave in mind. As Bruns understands, "taking the measure of the familiar by thestrange," that which makes poetry strange while enhancing its value, is "somethingentirely different from what we take to be the object of study in our schools" ( 184).

So, in place of a search for meaning, we have now an interest in the possibilityof what Roland Barthes has called "significance," a "process, in the course ofwhich the 'subject' of the text, escaping the logic of the ego-cogito . . . struggleswith meaning and is deconstructed ('is lost')." In this new paradigm, our class-rooms would undertake a "radical work": We are no longer to observe language,but to "enter" i t . . . and undo our selves in the process. Thus we embrace the newepistemological object of textuality, the "reading" (Barthes 38). We come here tothe world of deconstruction, the world of Derrida and the later Heidegger andWilliam Covino.

Teaching Ideologies of Text and World

Many of our theorists and certain of our practitioners have been exploring thepossibility of a deconstructive pedagogy for some time. Yet the approach is notwithout its detractors, and in any case its implications for teaching and learning—indeed, for our society—remain to be adequately explored. Responding to Paul deMan and others who addressed teaching and deconstruction in a special issue ofYale French Studies titled The Pedagogical Imperative, S. P. Mohanty has begunto investigate these implications in "Radical Teaching, Radical Theory: The Am-biguous Politics of Meaning." Mohanty intends to take the pedagogical imperativeas "the challenge of the need to think the institutional limits of the discursive"(151). Reviewing the-work of Peirce, Saussure, and Eco, Mohanty locates anopposition to the de Manian theory which he finds "too hastily opposed to the realworld." The more adequate theory, he believes, suggests that linguistic play isdetermined even as it is free. We have then a "discursivity" in language, wherewhat may appear to be "purely autonomous" is in practice constrained by context.All this springs from Mohanty's concern as a teacher:

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The problem is that in the semipastoral world of American liberal artscolleges, images of absolute radicality attract all too easily, for theyprovide other-worldly Archimedean points for criticism or politics.What such theory needs to examine is the extent to which the inflationof aporias is tied to their consequent devaluation. For if meanings areideological, so is their insistent negation; what we need to develop,rather, is a sense of the profound contextuality of meanings in theirplay and their ideological effects. (167-68)

Mohanty would not have us return to some pre-poststructuralist criticism andpedagogy. On the contrary, he notes approvingly Derrida's increasing concern for"the significance of institutions and determinate forms of power as they shape the'propriety' of knowledges and meanings." His concern lies with the indifferenceof deconstruction, as it has evolved in some quarters in the United States, withquestions of power—an indifference that Gerald Graff has called "an academicpseudo-politics" (504).

In this project Mohanty is not alone. Terry Eagleton has expressed concernthat "sophisticated" deconstruction seems to radically simplify the problem ofideology, on the grounds of its own discursive closure, its own certitude. From hisMarxist perspective, Eagleton believes we must examine not simply thelogocentricity of Western philosophy, but a "conjuncturality" which may over-determine logocentricity: "we still have to look at ideological conjunctures—toexamine the complex interplay of determinants in any concrete historical context"(150). Logocentricity has a "certain weight and character," he writes, and "[t]obelieve otherwise is simply to produce an ideological account of ideology; and itis not obvious that some 'Deconstructionist' criticism has not fallen into this trap"(152). Now, this proposal would surely be countered among deconstructionistswith the assertion that the ideological and the "weight and character" of itscontextuality are all primarily discursive. But Eagleton, accepting the idea fromAlthusser that "ideology is always a matter of material practices," believes "thereis no discourse not embedded in non-discursive practices." His assertion of con-juncturality sees ideology as springing from historically particular institutions andsocial practices, not as the disembodied textual effect envisioned by some readingsof deconstruction (153).

We find similar statements in the work of Edward W. Said: "The point is thattexts have ways of existing that even in their most rarefied form are alwaysenmeshed in circumstance, time, place, and society—in short, they are in theworld, and hence worldly" ("The World, the Text, and the Critic" 35). Said believesthat poststructuralist readings, closed from "actuality" within their hermeticuniverse, have placed "undue emphasis" on the limitlessness of interpretation (39).Drawing his views from Nietzsche and Foucault, Said sees texts as fundamentally"facts of power, not of democratic exchange" (45), a perception which "makefs]

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untenable the opposition between texts and the world," implicating texts in histori-cal, ideological, and formal circumstances, affirming actuality (49). This is not tosay that Said would simplify our world with totalities; on the contrary, he believesthat there are "no simple or discrete historical formations or social processes . . .no center, no inertly given and accepted authority, no fixed barriers orderinghuman history, even though authority, order, and distinction exist." Said wouldhave us move from our hermetic theory to a secular interpretation, converting "theabsence of religion into the presence of actuality" ("Opponents" 12). While theSiren lure of deconstruction remains strong for many who have plied its waters, to myway of sensing the world, these perspectives of Eagleton and Said sound equallyappealing chords. Indeed, I suggest that the most vital reading we might make ofdeconstruction would relate it to secular criticism not through discord, but harmony.Both of these perspectives, it seems to me, have clear relevance to our classrooms.

Feminist concerns in the Anglo-American tradition are one place where weoften feel the vital importance of secular criticism with burning immediacy. MaryE. Hawkesworth has put it this way: "Rape, domestic violence, and sexual harass-ment . . . are not fictions or figurations that admit of the free play of signification.The victim's account of these experiences is not simply an arbitrary imposition ofa purely fictive meaning on an otherwise meaningless reality" (555). Let ustranslate this powerful critique to the world of our classrooms: How sad it mightbe, to reflect at the end of your career that your classroom had been "simply anarbitrary imposition of a purely fictive meaning on an otherwise meaninglessreality." And how difficult it might be for students, to perceive this as the sum oftheir writing, their sign of success in our classes; it is doubtful, at best, that theywould discover in such a classroom a sense that their writing might matter. Surely,if this is what might be meant by an art of wondering, most of us would wantnothing to do with it.

Among colleagues, I hear these complaints whenever anyone begins to sug-gest the possibility of a pedagogy sensitized by deconstruction. But perhaps thiscommon indictment offends the deconstructionists unjustifiably. After all, there isin most cases no denial of reality in textuality, the "foundational" concept ofdeconstruction. Fredric Jameson has addressed this "fashionable conclusion thatbecause history is a text, the 'referent' does not exist." He responds that "historyis not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but that, as an absent cause, it isinaccessible to us except in textual form, and that our approach to it and to the Realitself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in thepolitical unconscious" (35; also see Balibar and Simon; Bruns, "Law as Her-meneutics" 319-20; Poovey, Gender 17-18). Even de Man addresses this issue, inhis "Resistance to Theory," supporting the referential function of language:

In a genuine semiology as well as in other linguistically orientedtheories, the referential function of language is not being denied—far

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from it; what is in question is its authority as a model for natural orphenomenal cognition. Literature is fiction not because it somehowrefuses to acknowledge "reality," but because it is not a priori certainthat language functions according to principles which are those, orwhich are like those, of the phenomenal world. It is therefore not apriori certain that literature is a reliable source of information aboutanything but its own language. (11)

This is the heart of de Man's concern with literariness. He views it as anindispensable tool for unmasking ideologies. Ideology, he writes, "is precisely theconfusion of linguistic with natural reality, of reference with phenomenalism."And de Man clearly shares Mohanty's objections regarding the ideologicallyloaded nature of the negation of meaning; he sees that "technically correct rhetori-cal readings," while theoretically sound, are also totalizing, "consistently defectivemodels of language's impossibility to be a model language." Thus deconstructivereadings inevitably represent "theory and not theory at the same time, the universalimpossibility of theory," which must "avoid and resist the reading they advocate"(19). Though some writers in other disciplinary contexts have observed thesecharacteristics and have noted their similarity to basic assumptions of feminismand African-American criticism (see, for example, Christian; Moi 12-13), theseimportant features of deconstruction are often overlooked when we talk and writeabout its implications for our practice in Composition.

Deconstruction and the Demands of Practical Wisdom

So the common contention, that a pedagogy grounded on an art of wonderingleads inexorably to a sterile anarchy, seems to me far too simplistic. I will notexplore the specifics of such a pedagogy here—the topic has been often enoughthe focus of our journals and conferences (for a variety of such views, see Atkinsand Johnson's collection, Reading and Writing Differently). I am interested hereto ask, not what would one do in a classroom modeled on deconstruction, but whatwould it mean to nurture an artist of wonder, a student writer forever undoingwhatever tentative truths she might encounter? I want to ask the most importantquestion we can address to any new proposal for our actions in our classrooms:What might be the implications of this art for students, for learning, for society?

In many ways, Covino's process is Gadamer's dialectical hermeneutics, aprocess that can never be said to progress or transcend, an open-ended movementof thinking that plays always between insight and bewilderment (Gadamer 314-31 ;also see Feyerabend 30). Gerald L. Bruns has nevertheless offered a usefuldistinction: On the one hand we have Hermeneutics, raising questions aboutunderstanding within dialogical systems—systems within which we participatewith some degree of equality. But of course, as Foucault and our own experiencehave shown us, our disciplines, our academic institutions, our corporations, and

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our government often fail to measure up as dialogical in this sense. Surely in manycases our students would not be inclined to feel that they play as equals withinthese systems. This is precisely where deconstruction comes to the fore, supersed-ing hermeneutics. Its skepticism, its presupposition of monologue or text assomething to be analyzed, brings us to question the very possibility of under-standing ("Structuralism" 15).

And in questioning the possibility of understanding we reach what I believeto be the value of deconstruction for our teaching. Bruns calls deconstruction "akind of phronesis, that is, a kind of wisdom that enables one to live through asituation . . . a way of living through the finitude of our being in which we alwaysappear to be in the grasp of tradition and cannot get out of it" (23). If this turns outto be true, we might add that an understanding of deconstruction among ourstudents could provide them with a means of discerning the powers that seek tocontrol them, of realizing that they, too, can take on roles of critical judgment andknowledge-making. What better way to nurture thoughtful writers, active learners,and involved citizens?

Where structuralism revealed to us that our meanings are not given butconstructed, deconstruction proposes that the meanings of our texts—our litera-ture, our classrooms, our colleges, our world—cannot with certainty be known,cannot be fixed. So what might it mean to talk of deconstruction as phronesis, nolonger merely as technique, no longer merely as theory, but now as practicalwisdom, a basis for ethical judgment and social action in our everyday lives? Thekey, I think, lies in an aspect of this way of thinking that seems to have escapedmany readers of Derrida and Covino. The play of deconstruction, its "decentering,"can never reach the radically anarchical view of knowledge that Feyerabend seeks.Of this limitation deconstruction is very much self-aware. This is the intersectionI see between deconstruction and the cultural criticism of Said or Eagleton: Evenshould we accept the textual play of deconstruction, we inevitably begin with "themeans at hand." Always there is "the necessity of borrowing one's concepts fromthe text of a heritage" (Derrida, "Structure" 282-85). As Covino puts it:

A certain security comes from the fact that one always begins withina context of "received" assumptions, the security that every"counterinduction" derives somehow from "the culture of reference,"and for this reason the innovator sustains a dialogue as well as atension with that culture, never cut loose altogether from communalexchange, never isolated in an entirely private subjective world. (126)

Even in the world seen from the perspective of deconstruction, texts still makesense; it is just that their "sense," like Bohr's atom, is always in flux, alwaystransforming itself just when we think we have got it securely fixed.

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In the seminal article of Derrida's deconstruction, "Structure, Sign and Playin the Discourse of the Human Sciences," he writes of the necessity of ourunderstanding that "the center" has no natural site, that it is "not a fixed locus buta function, a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutionscome into play." In the absence of a center or origin, everything becomes dis-course. But ironically, this is the limitation that inevitably grounds deconstructionin reality, and it is this grounding which opens the possibility of practical wisdomand responsible pedagogical application. Derrida continues: "There is no sense indoing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to shake metaphysics. We haveno language—no syntax and no lexicon—which is foreign to this history; we canpronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slipinto the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks tocontest" (280-81). So we are always at work in a context, the conceptualframework of language. It may be a language of différance, where we are unlikelyto produce expressions with fixed meaning, but it is nonetheless a language system,one that becomes all the more operational and lucid for our understanding of itsfigurality. Through our language, we are inescapably bound to our traditions. Andthis is where the greatest potential contribution of deconstruction lies. When weapply its work to our classrooms, it augments our concerns for truth and knowledgewith issues of authority and power, issues which are vital for Marxism, feminism,and the voices of the disempowered, to be sure, and also for the strength of a vitalparticipatory democracy.

Ethics, "Empowerment," and the Teaching of Language

Yet this is not to say that a classroom practice modeled on the art of wonderingwill in some magical way automatically "empower" students. I have privilegedCovino's perspectives here because I believe his work may offer much of value toour field. Nevertheless, as Derrida has said, "[e]ach time you read a tex t . . . thereis some misunderstanding" ("Jacques Derrida" 20). So to clarify how we mightresponsibly make use of Covino's work in our practice, let us propose twoalternative (mis)understandings of The Art of Wondering:

One reading—one that I have heard from a variety of Covino's readers—willmove teachers to seek classrooms primarily characterized by "puzzlement anddisequilibrium" (Covino 131). Here, students are to wonder without end, celebrat-ing ambiguity with no more productivity than that which we find among those whoengage the fruitless Platonic search for unattainable Truth. If we find in our readingof deconstruction a suggestion that this approach to teaching is desirable, we riskan unethical and stultifying practice. Surely, students will learn here no satisfactorypractical wisdom for the management of their lives. While it may offer somehelpful antidote for solipsism among students, this reading of deconstructionpresents an insufficient response to the stunning implications of postmoderntextuality. For though Covino's effort read in this way may incite readers to

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reconceive their notions of "process" in Composition instruction, and while thisreading may also offer the possibility that students can be brought to think forthemselves more productively, this particular art of wondering would remain inthe end unfortunately naive to the world (see Schilb 234).

In a different reading there looms a sound and important idea for our con-sideration. We find here a remedy something like the sophistry of Sharon Crowley,Susan Jarratt, or Jasper Neel, a place for ethical judgment in practical situations.Classrooms based on this version of deconstruction seek a deeper understandingof the ways in which language fabricates realities, and they insist upon theimperative of judgment, of ethical decision-making. This is the resolution of thepostmodern problematic we are finding in some materialist feminist criticism,where the theoretical and the political finally are reconciled, a resolution that hasbeen pursued for decades by African-American writer-critics (Christian 70-71).

We hear a lot about "empowering" students these days. Certainly, thoughtfulteachers everywhere empower students to varying degrees—that is why we are allinvolved in education, I suppose. Yet, to many of us, just what this "empowerment"might mean, along with our responsible role as teachers in this process, is not soeasy to determine. What we can do with confidence is to privilege the work ofstudents every bit as much as I have privileged the voices from theory in thesepages, to lead our students to an understanding that their expressions carry weightand value. Students need to believe that they are able and have the right to makedecisions for themselves. As Barbara Christian has observed, there is a differencebetween the lust for power and the need to become empowered (77). The latter—the right and ability to determine our own lives—is surely a responsible concerneven of those of us who teach in public institutions. This seems to me to be thevalue for our teaching of Covino and deconstruction in our second reading. Herewe continue to celebrate the generative power of imagination; we continue tonurture in students the "thoughtful uncertainty" that may elevate their sense ofinterdependence over solipsism. But here we would also seek in our goal of"empowerment" the perception among students that they can take active roles inshaping the future of their social and political lives. Teaching Composition neces-sarily foregrounds language, one of the principal media through which meaning ismobilized in our social world. That students might be brought to understand thisrole of language in the making of meaning ought to be a goal of all Com-positionists, since to avoid this issue in our teaching is to seriously misrepresentthe nature of our subject. Thus, a complete study of Composition must include thestudy of ideology and its attendant problems of interpretation, justification, andcritique (see Thompson). Whether or not students choose to utilize these percep-tions in their social, economic, and political lives is perhaps not our responsibility.But in teaching Composition in this manner we at least enable them to perceivethe construction of reality in a way that may open the possibility of more inde-pendent thought and action. So here, finally, we would "empower" the "mature

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citizen" sought by Paul Feyerabend, she who could make up her own mind despiteher recognition that any such decision must inevitably remain contaminated withuncertainty.

Uncertain New Hegemonies of Power

As most readers will have surmised, I am generally comfortable to assumethat for myself and for many of my students the textuality of postmodernism is avalid and enabling way of exploring our world. It seems to me that narrativity maywell be the nature of the world, or at least that partition of our world that we cancome to know. In this sense, perhaps, the postmodern is not so dramatically new.Richard Rorty has commented, for example, that Derrida's usefulness has not beenso much to create a new tradition as "to help us see the continuity between hopelesscontemporary attempts to 'found' language (or thought, or representation, orinquiry, or whatever else we feel nervous about), and hopeless past attempts to dothe same thing" ("Derrida on Language" 676). Similarly, 'Victoria Kahn and DavidKaufmann have separately defended politically engaged criticism, such as thatwhich might spring from my second reading of deconstruction, as a continuationof a tradition of ethical criticism characterized by Aristotle and Matthew Arnold.However, as I have explored in this paper, this world of textuality and deconstruc-tion is also characterized by an imperative to question even its own construction,so here, I believe, there is less danger of closed minds than we have found in thehumanist tradition. In any case, as Herbert Lindenberger observed in a recent issueof PMLA devoted to The Politics of Critical Language, "it is difficult to believethat things will ever again resemble yesterday's world of unspoken values, unex-amined ideologies, and stable, unquestioned canons" (406).

But still a troubling question of ideology persists, and we should all recognizethis. Idealists in my classes or among our colleagues, for example, would be rightto see this textuality business as just another metanarrative, another ideologicalconstruct—and, from their point of view, a false and dangerous one at that (seeRorty, "Idealism and Textualism" 169-70). Feminists and others dedicated toeradicating oppression through political action, who must necessarily rely onclaims of at least contingent or limited access to "truth," must also approach muchdeconstructive practice with suspicion, though some among them, like MaryPoovey and Leslie Wahl Rabine, have explored readings of deconstruction thatmight form a basis not only for the critique of ideologies but also for the movementtoward social action (Poovey, "Feminism and Deconstruction"; Rabine).

Perhaps, after all, our attention ought to focus at least as much on hegemonyas on ideology. Barbara Christian has voiced understandable concern that theseductive status of deconstruction in our theory has made "it possible for a fewpeople who know that particular language to control the critical scene," to establisha new critical orthodoxy that silences many, co-opts others, and, like all ideologies,tends to portray social relations reductively, dehumanizing people into stereotypi-

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Language, Power, and Play 309

cal categories such as "the other" or "the periphery" (71,75). Anyone who wouldseek to apply deconstruction to teaching should appreciate this tendency toward anew hegemony of postmodernism. While I comfortably—and, I believe, respon-sibly—seek to inform my practice with my second reading of deconstruction, Inevertheless believe we must be wary of totalities, from whatever direction theymay seek to contain us. I am concerned, for example, by those among us whoadvocate the universal play of signifiers as an exclusionary model for teaching,those who would silence with disdain any opposing voices from other traditions.For these new censors support a repressive patriarchal form of ideology, too. Albeitin the guise of free linguistic play, these postmodern voices sometimes fail torecognize their own monolithically oppressive authority (for a productive analogyfrom feminist textual politics, see Moi 8). Of course, I recognize that the path ofpluralism, too, is replete with pitfalls. We risk in extremes of this perspective anuncritical toleration of even the most objectionable ideologies; this is why I believewe have much to learn from secular criticism, and why I think we need to remainalert to the role of the "real" in any deconstructive pedagogy. At the very least, ifwe as individual teachers embrace deconstruction, are we not thereby obligated toexplore with our students the political nature of our own discourse? Can we avoidfor ourselves the imperative we would direct to all others? It is not so difficult tounderstand, after all, that in positing the postmodern we do not simply reject ortransform existing power structures; rather—and clearly, it seems to me—in doingso we seek a redistribution of power toward ourselves. Our modes of rationalizing,"of finding grounds for the irrational or unaccountable in any narrative account,"have recently been addressed by J. Hillis Miller. Miller posits four such modes—the social/ideological, the individual/psychological, the linguistic, and thereligious—and notes both their respective imperialism and the strong resistancethey encounter in some of those to whom they are proposed (182). While I wouldhesitate to draw distinct lines of partition identifying such explanatory modes, Ibelieve Miller's observations regarding their imperialism and resistance are validand important. Perhaps we would be wise to heed the warning Victor Brombertsounded in his 1989 Presidential Address to the MLA, to avoid the dogmatism ofhermetic discourse and remain open to intellectual commerce (39).

These questions of conflicting value systems trouble me as key challenges ofour practice, ones to which I believe we ought to develop greater sensitivity (for apositive example from classroom practice, see Cooper 218-19). What we do knowis that teaching involves practical-moral consequences for people with a widediversity of interests and values. So it may be true, given this diversity, thatteaching can in any case not be regulated by the generalizations of theory. For ifwe view the teaching/learning situation as a practical act of "reading," we canperhaps gain little foresight or control over the effects ofthat act. As J. Hillis Millerhas formulated this relationship: "There is no reading that is not theoretical, butthe actual act of reading is always to some degree the disconfirmation of theory."

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310 Rhetoric Review

Miller speculates that the "interaction between theory and reading might bedefined as a constant infinitesimal calculus in which reading informs and alterstheory, along with the other vital and inaugural effects it has" (94). While theirspecific nature may be uncertain in advance, we can be sure that these other vitaland inaugural effects unavoidably include the ethical and political. Thus, if we areattracted by deconstruction and its influence, we cannot forgo the imperative toexplore in our classrooms relationships among language, power, and action. Asteachers who must focus on language, it seems to me, this is an appropriate andnecessary aspect of our practice, a perspective I believe all teachers of Composi-tion should explore with some thoughtfulness.

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James N. Laditka is an Assistant Professor of English at Mohawk Valley Community College, wherehe teaches composition and literature. His research interests include ethics and ideology in composition,on which he has published in the Journal of Advanced Composition.

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