Conversation piece
I haven't read AKMA's book, What Is Post-Modern Biblical Criticism?, but now that David Weinberger is interrogating it, I want to. Anyone who can elucidate both deconstruction and post-modernism in 81 pages deserves not only to have their book purchased and read, but to have the central reading room of the Library of Congress dedicated in their honor.
David's 1,600-word question for AKMA provokes the following comment partly because I know whereof he speaks, as a result of my own hoary context in 70s academia. I knew and read the folks whom he describes, still wincing in the memory of the experience, as ''cowardly bullies.''
Much literary theory of the time was awash - not in attempts to understand the larger issues presented by folks like Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man - but rather in obnoxiously redundant efforts to use insights in their work to say, over and over with extraordinary verbal vigor, ''Neener Neener!'' to anyone attempting to understand, well, anything.
If this was boring then, imagine what it is now.
With enormous respect for both AKMA and Weinberger, my comment is simply this:
David rightfully notes that the very folks who so diligently and soberly work to undermine all interpretive power are the same ones who authoritatively presume that their own interpretation of that groundlessness carries nothing less than Biblical weight.
He couches the entire issue, however, in a mode of hermeneutic endeavor that assumes that what one does with texts is interpret their meaning - translate them, that is, into some other discursive exposition that, one hopes, approximates or unpacks the "meaning" of the original.
Not yet having read AKMA's book, I can't say whether he too confines the scope of textual encounters to this sense of hermeneutics.
I would simply suggest that much of what is original in lit-crit and lit-theory in the past 25 years or so has more to do with an openness to the act of reading in a broader sense than "just" interpreting the "meaning" of a text. Genial insights into the subtle arsenals of poetics and rhetoric suggest that the encounter with a text is less than adequate to the extent it focuses exclusively on what can be said "in other words." That is, the effort of rigorous translation leaves out something essential to the experience of reading, and to the generation of audiences.
It's a commonplace: What gets lost in translation of poetry is, in other words, the poetry. (And all good writing has poetry.)
For guidance in this question I would point to the work of Walter Benjamin, whose kaleidoscopic and nuanced reading praxis is exemplary. His Illuminations and Arcades Project are especially crucial in this regard.
To get quickly to the point: David and AKMA, so far, appear to be having a conversation that excludes undeniable elements of literariness to the extent that they restrict the interrogation of texts to matters of discursive interpretation.
Elsewhere David has indicated he is thinking about ''the ways in which our Web selves are literary.'' I would suggest it is precisely the non-discursive elements of figure, of poetry, of image, of form and design, of style, genre and play that dissolve and transgress and put into play our Web selves in a mode that we could call ''literary.''
(It is interesting to note that historically, these elements of writing have virtually always in Western philosophy been associated with the feminine - as distracting and seductive "adjuncts" to the serious masculine business of meaning. Halley Suitt has something to say about this today, here.)
David insists he is looking for conversation to be ongoing, and to go beyond saying ''how interesting!'' That makes it easy for him to dismiss mindless deconstructionists whose sole conversational gambit is to say, "infinite regression" (translation: "Neener!")
But does it really do justice to the larger issues raised by rigorous folks like Benjamin, Derrida, etc. to equate them with their tedious ephebes?
Weinberger himself agrees that there's something liberating about an approach that refuses to countenance orthodox, univocal readings. The thrust of his book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, moves toward a vision of the Web as enabling a greater openness of humans to be.
It would be ironic if David's laudable desire for "conversation" were to foreclose avenues of interaction - with texts on and off the web - precisely because such roads led to challenging the conceptual closure implicit in purely discursive models of language.
Tom Matrullo, 4.12.02
2:00:24 PM 
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