The Trickster and the Paranormal

by George P. Hansen

  French literary critic Roland Barthes, a leading figure in both semiotics and structuralism, promulgated Saussure’s ideas. Barthes considered the problem of meaning. In his book Mythologies (1957) he followed Saussure saying that a signifier and its signified together constitute a “sign”15 and thus produce meaning. Meaning is not simply information, but more than that; it is a wholistic concept involving a representation and its object.

  Here again, a distinction is drawn, this time between the signifier and the signified, another binary opposition, but the terms are united via meaning. It is commonly assumed that there is a simple, objective correspondence between the signifier and signified even though they are separate entities. It is assumed that language is only a set of names for things, events, and concepts. These assumptions are incorrect, but few recognize the extent of the implications. This lies at the heart of deconstructionism, and magic.

  Saussure identified a realm betwixt and between the signifier and signified, and that suggests the trickster is lurking. In fact semiotics can be considered the trickster’s domain. Umberto Eco, a professor at the University of Bologna, in his book A Theory of Semiotics commented that “semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie” (Eco’s emphasis).16 Ergo the signifier is the tool of the trickster. His book The Limits of Interpretation (1990) devotes an entire chapter to a theoretical consideration of fakes and forgeries. Eco recognized the importance of deception, but I don’t think that he made much progress with it. For instance his discussion of fakes and forgeries is primarily about classifying them, but it goes little further than that.

  Despite his limited success in addressing deception theoretically, Eco’s fiction demonstrates profound understanding. I heartily recommend his best-selling novel Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) for anyone with an interest in the topics covered in this book. It tells the story of intrigue, conspiracy, and paranoia surrounding what ultimately turns out to be a remnant of an ancient laundry list. I only half-jokingly refer to it as the best available ethnography of modern-day American ufology. Eco really does understand much about the occult, secrets, and deception. His success with Foucault’s Pendulum suggests that these topics are expressed more effectively via fiction. Malcolm Ash-more recognized a similar pattern vis-à-vis reflexivity; he noted that much involving that topic is presented in fictional terms. Some topics may inherently limit what can be meaningfully said about them in any straightforward manner.

  Deconstructionism

  Deconstructionism is a major component of postmodern thought, and it has been one of the most controversial areas in the humanities in the last 30 years. It can be explicated from several angles, but I will speak to it primarily within the theoretical perspectives of structuralism and semiotics, its two immediate predecessors.

  Saussure noted that signifiers are completely arbitrary; they have no necessary connection to the signified. He assumed a relation exists but didn’t really specify how it was accomplished. Deconstructionism seized on this idea. Its proponents assert that the signifier is completely separate from the signified, and that no text has any clear referent; all are ambiguous. Furthermore, meaning is neither to be found objectively in a text, nor in some exterior reality, nor is it given by the writer; rather, meaning is imparted by the reader, with each one producing a different interpretation. This comes down to an attack on objectivity. Deconstructionism, like reflexivity, leads to paradox. For if it is asserted that no objective meaning can be found in any text, then that applies to deconstructionism as well. Opponents therefore suggest that deconstructionists’ own writings have no real meaning and thus need not be considered seriously.

  Virtually all philosophical positions lead to absurdity when taken to their limits. Deconstructionism is no exception, but it is valuable because it explicitly challenges limits. However, as its advocates came to realize the full force of it, they pulled back from the extreme view. They sensed that its innate subversiveness could undermine their own positions. One of the symptoms is the poor writing and impenetrable jargon that fills much of deconstructionism’s literature. Also, the adoption of term “post-structuralism” hints at some leeriness of fully embracing deconstructionism.

  French philosopher Jacques Derrida is regarded as the founder of the movement, and he first emerged as a force in the mid 1960s during the debates on structuralism. In the 1970s deconstructionism took hold in the U.S. largely due to the efforts of Paul de Man, who served chairmanships in Yale University’s French and comparative literature departments. Derrida held temporary appointments at Yale, and with their collaboration, de Man soon became the leading literary proponent of the movement.

  It is altogether appropriate that deconstructionism found its most hospitable reception among literary critics, because literary criticism is an innately reflexive discipline. Reflexivity forces literary theorists to confront limits, and deconstructionism is aggressive in exposing them. The central issue can be conceptualized as the problem of representation, i.e., the relationship between the signifier and signified. This is similar to reflexivity, where distinguishing the subject and object is made problematic.

  The consequences of this idea are not limited to a few arcane works of literary scholars. In discussing anthropological interpretation, de Man writes in Blindness and Insight, “a fundamental discrepancy always prevents the observer from coinciding fully with the consciousness he is observing. The same discrepancy exists in everyday language, in the impossibility of making the actual expression coincide with what has to be expressed, of making the actual sign coincide with what it signifies.” Deconstructionism calls attention to ambiguity and uncertainty, and at its core, it is about the problem of representation in all forms.

  The issues are also relevant to the sciences, but few are aware of it. In his essay “Science versus Literature” (1967) Roland Barthes explains, “As far as science is concerned language is simply an instrument, which it profits it to make as transparent and neutral as possible, it is subordinate to the matter of science (workings, hypotheses, results) which, so it is said, exists outside language and precedes it. On the one hand and first there is the content of the scientific message, which is everything; on the other hand and next, the verbal form responsible for expressing that content, which is nothing. It is no coincidence that, from the sixteenth century onwards, the corporate blossoming of empiricism, rationalism and an evidential religion (with the Reformation), that is, of the scientific spirit in the widest sense of the term, should have been accompanied by a regression in the autonomy of language.”

  Barthes is describing rationalization (in Weber’s sense), though he does not use the term. Like magic, the problem of meaning is banished from the consciousness of science. Deconstructionism raises the issue overtly. it points out that meaning is neither neutral nor transparent. It asserts that language precedes science and thus has primacy over it. This is subversive, a reversal of privilege; it lowers the status of science.

  Rationalization separates things; it makes clear-cut distinctions; it makes things “objective.” In deconstruction, the process is taken to its ultimate conclusion. The signifier and signified are separated, and any objective connection between them is denied. Meaning is voided.

  Formal logic is similar. In it symbols are independent of any particular meaning. There is a continual interplay of symbols, which refer only to each other; this gives logic considerable power, but at the cost of direct meaning. In essence, deconstructionism completes the rationalization of the world, in its literary manifestation.

  Deconstructionists and post-structuralists understand that there must be shared symbols, assumptions, and meanings for social life to occur. They typically assert that those are established by power. Power dictates and enforces meaning, which is used to dominate others. Power, and its abuse, are frequent themes for those who draw on post-structuralist ideas. They frequently lament hierarchies, citing the usual binary oppositions: men over women, white over
black, straight over gay. Virtually every minority group has protesters who now use this obscure academic idiom. Because of its intentional obscurity, it is only mildly subversive to the establishment.

  The issue of power again leads back to Max Weber. Weber’s discussion of authority was about power and domination. He identified three types of authority: charismatic, traditional, and bureaucratic. Pure charisma, the most fundamental, involves supernatural power. The other types are rationalized forms of it. One need only recall Weber’s insight that the process of rationalization calls for the elimination of magic from the world (in actuality, elimination of the conscious awareness of magic by cultural elites). With the process of disenchantment virtually complete in the academy, deconstructionists (and everyone else) display an almost complete amnesia as to the primitive foundations of their school of thought. Nearly all have forgotten the taboo areas, the liminal regions, those betwixt and between categories, the anomalous, the supernatural. This has consequences, because it is there that the trickster manifests. The obscurity of the deconstructionists’ writings, coupled with the violent controversy surrounding them, are subtle indicators of his effects. The suppression from consciousness of archetypal forces allows supernatural power to operate unimpeded.

  The deconstructionists have also detached themselves from the world (more precisely, extinguished the conscious awareness of their attachment). They cannot fathom the consequences of their ideas, because, after all, all is text. When they look into the abyss they see nothing. University of California historian Page Smith described this in his book Killing the Spirit: Higher Education in America (1990): “For decades professors have been destroying their students’ illusions, their ‘false consciousness,’ their naive adherence to certain obsolete values (religion being one of the most obvious). Now the shoe appears to be on the other foot. Derrida is destroying their illusions, especially their illusion that they are engaged in objective, scientific investigation of the world. What they are really doing is imposing their own, ultimately baseless, views on their students and their colleagues, and there is no independent, ‘objective’ evidence that their illusions are any better than those of their students; they may well be worse. The students’ illusions had at least enabled the students to live a reasonably ordered existence. Undoubtedly there is a vertiginous thrill in looking into the abyss. Derrida may well be the professors’ equivalent of a teenager’s horror movie, the difference being that the teenager can walk out of the movie house into a moderately real world, whereas it is not yet clear that professors can assemble a post-Derridarian world out of the lumber of the deconstructed one. All we can say is that the human psyche, like the rest of nature, abhors a vacuum and something will fill it.” That “something” will almost certainly be supernatural, and academe hasn’t a clue.

  An archetype suppressed is not an archetype subdued; it erupts elsewhere. In fact the trickster manifested in the lives of leading deconstructionists, and the results were not pretty. Roland Barthes did what he called “linguistic studies” while having sex with young boys in Morocco. Michel Foucault infected some of his followers with AIDS.

  Yet even now he is the object of something of a secular canonization effort, with references to him as “Saint” Foucault, and even a “hagiography” (the author’s term) has been written. The archetypal influence persists.

  Paul de Man is an even better exemplar. After his death it was discovered that he had collaborated with the Nazis in Belgium, and that he was a bigamist who abandoned his children. David Lehman’s revealing study Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man reports that “When the twenty-eight-year-old de Man embarked for the United States in 1948, he left behind a crowd of angry creditors and the prospect of a lawsuit. He had ruined his father and had earned himself a local reputation for dishonesty. Ortwin de Graef noted that Editions Hermes [de Man’s publishing house] was ‘appropriately’ named—Hermes being the patron of thieves in Greek mythology. The Belgian sociologist Georges Goriely recalled de Man, the friend of his youth, for conferencegoers at the University of Antwerp in June 1988. ‘A charming, humorous, modest, highly cultured man,’ said Goriely. But a scoundrel. ‘Swindling, forging, lying were, at least at the time, second nature to him.’” The trickster archetype is striking, and the life of de Man confirms the aphorism that philosophy is largely autobiography.

  Deep down, most deconstructionists and post-structuralists are rationalists. They deny the mystical and supernatural. For them everything is detached; there are no magical interconnections. They will undoubtedly dismiss the above manifestations as mere coincidence, having nothing to do with deconstructionism and its ideas. They never understood the intellectual roots of their beliefs.

  The case of Jacques Derrida is also instructive. To his credit, he at least briefly addressed the paranormal; he did not completely repress it. His paper “Telepathy” was first published in 1981, and it is extremely odd. Basically, it is a confused hodgepodge of fragments of writings from Freud (letters, notes, etc.). It is even more obscure than Derrida’s usual writings. Fortunately, Nicholas Royle, the translator of the article, provided some commentary. He admitted that “Derrida cannot see very clearly in ‘Telepathy’,” adding “It is frightening. Reading Derrida is frightening. As he says in ‘Telepathy’, he scares other people and he scares himself.” Telepathy seems to disconcert him, though he does not know why. Some of his other writings shed some light on this. In his Specters of Marx (1993), Derrida asserted that “There has never been a scholar who really, and as scholar, deals with ghosts … There has never been a scholar who, as such, does not believe in the sharp distinction between the real and the unreal, the actual and the inactual, the living and the non-living.” This is a direct confession of his rationalism and reveals his inability to comprehend alternatives. Yet he has a vague sense that rationalism is insufficient.

  Derrida is an elderly academic white male, comfortably ensconced in the exceedingly ethnocentric rationalistic French intellectual culture. It is not surprising that he is so grossly ignorant of the paranormal and its implications. When he ventured into that foreign territory, being oblivious to any useful scholarship, he lunged for the only thing he knew relevant: the antiquated writings of Freud. (As discussed in the chapter on totemism, Freud was very ambivalent about the paranormal. It upset him.) Obviously unsettled by what he encountered, he was unable to articulate it.

  Nevertheless, Derrida’s article attests to the importance of telepathy. But the topic renders him almost incoherent; he doesn’t know what to do with it. Royle commented that “Derrida implies that a theory of telepathy, especially insofar as his ‘own’ text promotes the possibility of such a theory, is inextricably linked to the question of writing.” Royle proposed “’Telepathy’ as a name for literature as discursive formation.”28 Derrida and Royle seemed to recognize telepathy as important for communication, but they were at a loss as to how to think about it.

  Although the blind rationalism of Derrida is typical, awareness of the liminal regions has not been completely suppressed in the academy, and a few have drawn on deconstructionist theory in conjunction with the trickster. The taboo has been partly overcome, fittingly, in theories of criticism of two minority (i.e., marginal) literatures, that of the American Indian and the African American.

  When American Indian literature and deconstructionism are mentioned, the name of Gerald Vizenor invariably arises. Vizenor is a mixed-blood (his preferred term) intellectual and Berkeley professor, and the trickster is central to his personal and professional lives. When only 20 months old, his father was murdered, and he was raised sometimes by relatives and at times by his impoverished mother. As an adolescent he was caught in petty theft.

  The absent father, impoverished mother, and thievery are part of the Hermes archetype. Vizenor has a betwixt and between status because he is of mixed blood. He is also a communicator and mediator between the American Indian and White cultures. His eminence is attested by th
e Winter 1985 issue of American Indian Quarterly, which was devoted to his work. It contains a number of articles related to trickster issues. Trickster themes pervade his writings, and his essay “Trickster Discourse: Comic Holotropes and Language Games” (1989) relates trickster ideas to those of deconstructionism. Vizenor’s writings are difficult going without a substantial background; even Barbara Babcock refers to his “enigmatic, incomprehensible, ambiguous, ambivalent language.”

  Fortunately, Kimberly Blaeser has provided a superb presentation of his ideas in her book Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition (1996). Blaeser is particularly well suited for the task; like Vizenor she is a mixedblood, lived on the White Earth Indian Reservation in Minnesota as a child, and is a poet. She applies deconstructionist and post-structuralist ideas in an accessible manner. Hers is one of the best descriptions I have found of the contrasts between the rationalistic Western European outlook and that of Native Americans.

  She points out that ambiguity is key to Vizenor’s writings, and that Vizenor blurs a variety of concepts and boundaries and makes them problematical. She tells us “Truth, Vizenor repeatedly illustrates, may lie outside the realm of simplistic distinction between fact and fiction.” He calls into question the distinction between history and myth, and his writings mix them in a confusing fashion. This is undoubtedly tied to his life experiences, and Blaeser reports that “In Vizenor’s writing the trickster figure becomes nearly synonymous with and a metaphor for the tribal mixedblood, whose symbolic role it is to subvert the artificial distinctions of society.”