Reading Literature After Deconstruction
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Reading Literature After Deconstruction By Robert Lumsden

Chapter 1:  What Happens? What Is to Be Done? A Paean to Bricolage
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…Fichte refers to teaching as the self-unveiling of the students to the professors and the professors to the students…a dialogue that is supposed to fuse the teachers and the students into a single corporate body with “a common spiritual existence…in which they have learned early on to know each other in depth and to respect each other, here all their reflections take off from a base which is identically know by all and which provides no matter of dispute between them.” This is the community of the University, the endless dialogue of which Humboldt and Schleiermacher speak. It is a community whose dialogue is about nothing, in the sense that no issues for dispute are engaged. There are no differends, no radical and incommensurable differences, only arguments as to the exact nature of what it is we agree on.18

Habermas, too, in his “The Idea of the University”, “explicitly returns to Schleiermacher’s insistence” that it is consensus, grounded in rational communication, which “ ‘in the last analysis…hold[s] university processes in their various functions together’ ”.19

While it would be restrictive to envisage consensus as a goal of any discussion, there is also something debilitating about the idea of resting with an idea of intractable differences—with the differend for instance—as a number of writers on Lyotard have pointed out.20 Nor does Bill Readings’ call for the institution of a “radical and uncomfortable dissensus” at the heart of university life offer much beyond a negative mirror image of the kind of consensual model he argues against.21 Perpetual dissent opens a way through exhaustion or irritation to a type of quietude which is always likely to deflate expectation.

Both concepts, that of consensual community and dissenting aggregation, lay a restriction on the direction discussion might take by harbouring an idea, however shadowy, of how it ought to go. Both enshrine a type of pragmatism based on a disguised agenda inclined to shape enquiry from its beginnings.

As prophylactic against such idealisms, we might focus on the form and process of discussion itself instead of allowing attention to drift towards undeclared outcomes. Rather than aiming for consensus, or aiming to keep difference on the table, it is preferable to cultivate the habit of listening with a kind of diffident, though not a passionless, interest.