Observations: Deconstructionism and Eric Voegelin

Since the invention of moveable type, the precision of voice in the printed sign—the suggestions of gesture and tone accompanying voice—has been increasingly a challenge to the poet. The critic has enlarged his office largely in this ambiguous ground, appropriating to himself increasingly an authority whose culmination has been the establishment of ambiguity in the sign as the dominant mystery of sign, separate from the ambiguity of being itself. Within the ambiguity the critic may hope to establish a supreme reign. The consequence has been, most recently, an absolute decree of the infinity of the text itself, that first article of faith held by the Deconstructionist, the critic as poet. The necessary premise of this latest gnostic act of faith is the dissociation of the text from any mind that is not the present mind of the new artist, the critic as poet. In addition, the text is dissociated as well from any signified reality. In that double operation, the text may then be declared infinite.

Now the critic as poet has as his especial act, in consequence of the double dissociation, a spontaneous performance of acrobatics upon the now-infinitely pliable trampoline, the text. That is the declared arena from which all other aspects of being are not simply exiled but denied, in a severely Heideggerian voiding of being. But the end is no encounter of being, but an existential gesture in which the isolated mind encounters the void. Thus, this arena allows no grandstand for spectators, or at least the performer must admit no grandstand, since the logical consequence of such an admission opens the established vacuum to being—to an intrusion of separate mind with sign and an implication of sign in relation to the signified.

What one has is a strange principle of mind in relation to sign. A general anarchy of mind is the assumed prerequisite to the principle of an absolutism of the particular mind as the nearest that the particular mind may come to the pure vacuum of its arena. That assumption may not be given explicit assertion, since an assertion of the principle and a defense of it through signs is a contradiction of the initial article of faith: namely, the infinity of text, an infinity of the sign and any complex of signs including the defense. That article of faith must include the assertion of the principle itself, since the assertion is a text.

At this point, we discover the collapse of what in retrospect must be called at best a critical fad, Deconstruction. The evidence of that collapse is increasingly apparent, though the academy—always a decade or century behind in its recognitions of untenable positions of mind—struggles to establish Deconstruction as part of an ordered curriculum. One need but read current catalogues from larger universities to discover the evidence. What is happening, beyond these belated official encounters, is a very ancient and inescapable principle of signs: a relation of an originating mind to the text itself. One need not deny ambiguity in signs to recognize as well the necessary consent of mind to sign. That consent is an action of finite mind in its attempt to establish a relation between its finitude and an infinitude which is not in the sign per se but subscendent to, and transcendent of, the sign. The effective demonstrations of the point one may explore in Eric Voegelin’s Anamnesis, as his exploration there is complemented by Etienne Gilson’s Philosophy and Linguistics.

Between the finite and infinite, sign becomes mediator, its engagement mediating and alleviating incommensurates in the mystery of the encounter of thought with being. The scholastic point (as in St. Augustine and St. Thomas) that sign cannot comprehend being, while it may lead to a despair of mind in its attempt to escape its own finitude or to an arrogance of presumption in declaring mind’s infinitude as borrowed from the “text” of being, nevertheless reminds one that the implication of infinitude is not a property of sign itself but of that being toward which thought reaches through sign. Thus, one must at last recognize the absurdity in the proposition that the sign—the text—has as its own property infinitude. What one recognizes in such games with signs is an intellectual alchemy, whereby mind would dance its own being as its own first and final cause.

What one has, then, is a gnosticism such as that which Eric Voegelin spent his life studying and exposing in its multiple manifestations in the sweep of recorded intellectual history. He comes to a recapitulation of his long quest in that compact, if finally incomplete, statement, whose articulation he struggled with up to the very point of his death. “Quod Deus dicitur” is a reflection on what may be said about the mind’s experience of the infinite through sign. It is a recalling to fundamental questions, a hopeful voice reaching us through signs.

We shall, I believe, become increasingly aware—in and out of the academy—of the necessity of recovering a community of mind through sign, through a gradual recovery of that property common to mind, the sign itself. Thus we may recover some community of mind with the truth of things, a necessity more fundamental and complex than the shallow cries of alarm about education’s getting “back to the basics,” a subscribed shibboleth which at the moment has no intellectual substance, only an impetus of confused alarm.

It is such an anticipation of a return to a sanity of mind that I find in the work of Eric Voegelin, in his concern for consciousness in relation to the complexity of existence, for instance. In this respect, he leaves us a considerable legacy. It is a prophetic gift that the poet, philosopher, theologian, and scientist may all profit from and celebrate. For he has succeeded in recalling us to the known but forgotten gifts of voice in signs, that voice of thought deeper than merely the ear’s response. He recalls the possibility of a community of mind whose geography is the border between finitude and infinitude. In this place of mind, between extremes, we may recover both the music and the gestures that mind makes in the immediacy of existence.

Voegelin saw that we have allowed ourselves to be gradually wooed from the immediacy through mechanisms of mind taken as if moveable type itself, developed through a series of questionable intricacies to new alchemistic formulae of the relation of thought to being. As we have done so, we have developed a new idol of the mind, at the moment making us breathless with its spectacle. We have given it a mechanistic body refined almost to spirit, save for the continuing tribute of living mind sacrificed to it. The new homunculus, the computer, waits the collapse of mind, when it too must crumble as the mummy touched by the reality of air.

Meanwhile, there is that quieter, slower, surer, more patient voice to guide us in this arena of our confusions so that we may at last put all man’s makings—those of scientist or philosopher—in ordinate relation to being. If we happen to be poets, we might find the voice of Eric Voegelin to be our Virgil, leading us out of a collapse of mind toward mystery larger than mind, toward a recovered encounter with being.

Author

  • Marion Montgomery

    Marion Montgomery (1925-2011) was professor of English at Georgia University. He also published poetry, short stories, and three novels, which focus on conflict between the Old and the New South.

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