by Judy Jones
Roland Barthes
So, why have we chosen to tell you about structuralism, given that it’s pretty much yesterday’s papers? Two reasons. First, it’s the immediate ancestor of— and force behind—poststructuralism, which is, in turn, the kissing cousin of deconstruction and postmodernism (the literary variety, not the architectural one). All three were incredibly hot French theories that had a huge impact not only on philosophy, but on art theory, cinema studies, cultural studies, queer studies, and a host of other “studies” at the end of the twentieth century.
The deconstructionists were led by the philosopher Jacques Derrida, who in 1966 started one of the greatest academic food fights of all time when he took on the structuralists at a conference at Johns Hopkins University. Derrida lobbed his sloppy joe: Lévi-Strauss and his gang were wrong about their binaries leading to reality. There was no such thing as “objective reality.” Indeed, according to Derrida, “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte” (“There is nothing outside of the text”). Signifiers just keep stacking up on top of more signifiers, until there’s an endless chain of words. And we, of course, are stuck in the middle of all those signifiers ourselves. That means that our “selves” are really nothing more than by-products of language.
Derrida was joined by (before their deaths) the “late” Barthes, “late” Foucault, and “late” Lacan, though it’s worth noting that these guys shot a few peas across the cafeteria at each other as well. Et voilà—out of the free-for-all, postmodernism was born.
This “method”—again, it can’t really be called a philosophy, since it denounces grand theories—was all the rage in American academic circles during the Eighties and Nineties. (The French, interestingly enough, had had enough of this stuff by the early Seventies, which explains why most of these fellows ended up in American universities.) The deconstructionists’ intent was, in the words of one convert, to “disturb” the work “along its own fault lines.” In a similar vein, postmodernists questioned all such supposedly self-evident structures as superior/inferior, in/out, original/belated, and man/woman, and accused all systems— power structures no less than paragraph structures—of being propped up from the inside and, get this, of unwittingly betraying, under cross-examination, exactly how, and how much, they are propped up.
Though the influence of thinkers like Derrida and Foucault is still evident— particularly in the ivory towers—it has fallen out of favor recently. Part of this has to do with the impenetrability of the jargon, which often made it difficult to tell whether the theorists were on to something new and genuinely complex, or just covering their tracks. Check out, for example, Derrida in the early Nineties: “Needless to say, one more time, deconstruction, if there is such a thing, takes place as the experience of the impossible.”
At a certain point it also seemed as though deconstruction could never be much more than a literary parlor trick. OK, maybe signifiers are arbitrary, and the meaning of a text can be pulled apart to the point of incoherence. But generally speaking, that happens only in graduate English departments. In the rest of the world, things do hang together pretty well—and that includes texts, too. (With occasional exceptions, like deciphering directional text for assembling children’s toys late on Christmas Eve—a postmodern post-eggnog moment.)
The big issue with postmodernism, though, was its relativity. While a lot of us could get behind the thinkers’ attacks on the nasty consequences of modernity (which was, after all, the target of their critiques), other conclusions—that we can’t confidently declare one idea or way of life better than another (which was postmodernist extraordinaire Jean-François Lyotard’s point), that there is no such thing as universal “truth” or even right or wrong, that it all comes down to language (Derrida’s point) or various forms of power and discourse (Foucault’s point)—made a lot of people uncomfortable. (It didn’t help matters when it turned out that Derrida’s friend, fellow Yale professor, and deconstructionist Paul de Man had written anti-Semitic articles for a Nazi newspaper in Belgium during World War II, or when vague rumors surfaced that Foucault had engaged in unsafe sex in San Francisco bathhouses after he had been diagnosed as HIV-positive.) When the terrorist attacks of 9/11 took place, critics of postmodernism and deconstruction—and there have always been plenty—took the opportunity to say, “I told you so! There is evil in the world!” and claimed that the “age of relativism” was over.
Of course, nothing’s quite that simple. The spread of the Internet and the “virtual” world—not to mention the proliferation of reality TV—has blurred the lines between the real and the unreal (or, as one of the last recalcitrant postmodernists, Jean Baudrillard, likes to put it, “the simulacrum”), making a lot of postmodern ideas seem just a little less loopy.
And that brings us to the second reason we’ve decided to talk about structuralism as well as postmodernism and deconstruction: Questioning authority— wondering not only who’s in charge but also why we’re behaving as if he or she were really in charge—has never been a bad idea, though lately it seems to have become riskier. While French theories like structuralism and poststructuralism are less fashionable in the United States these days (not unlike the French themselves—think “patriot fries”), it’s worth noting that no other new, noteworthy ways of thinking have really risen to take their place. When they do, we’ll get back to you.
Three Well-Worn Arguments
for the Existence of God
These old chestnuts mark the point at which philosophy—which supposedly bases its arguments on reason—and theology—which gets to call in revelation and faith—overlap. The result, as you’ll see, sounds an awful lot like wishful thinking.
THE COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT: This one dates all the way back to Aristotle’s theory of motion and encompasses Thomas Aquinas’ version, known as the argument from contingency and necessity. We know from experience that everything in the world moves and changes, said Aristotle (or simply exists, said Aquinas), and everything that moves, or exists, has a mover, i.e., a cause, something that precedes it and makes it happen. Now, we can trace lots of things in the world back to their immediate causes, but there is always another cause behind them and another behind them. Obviously, said Aristotle & Co., we can’t keep tracing effects back to causes indefinitely; the buck has to stop somewhere, there has to be one cause that isn’t, itself, caused by something else, or one entity that existed before all the others could come into existence. This first cause, the Unmoved Mover, is God. The cosmological argument, widely accepted for centuries, started running into snags when Hume decided that the whole principle of cause-and-effect was a mirage. Later, Kant made matters worse by pointing out that while there may be cause-and-effect in this world, we don’t get to assume that the same holds true out there in the Great Unknown. Today, critics counter the cosmological argument by pointing out that there’s no reason to assume we can’t have an infinite series of causes, since we can construct all sorts of infinite series in mathematics. Also that the argument never satisfactorily dealt with the question any four-year-old knows enough to ask, namely, Who made God?
THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT: This is an example of the old philosopher’s dream of explaining the nature of the universe through sheer deduction; also, of how slippery a priori reasoning can get. The argument, which probably originated with St. Anselm back in the Middle Ages and which hit its peak with Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, the Continental Rationalists of the seventeenth century, runs as follows: We can conceive of perfection (if we couldn’t, we wouldn’t be so quick to recognize imperfection) and we can conceive of a Perfect Being. God is what we call that Being which embodies all imaginable attributes of perfection, the Being than which no greater Being can be conceived. Well, if you’re going to imagine a Perfect Being, it stands to reason that He exists, since a Perfect Being that didn’t exist wouldn’t be as perfect as a Perfect Being that did, and isn’t, therefore, the most Perfect Being you can imagine. (Is He?) Hence, by definition, God exists. (Doesn’t He?
) If you’re still reading at this point, you may already have noticed that the ontological argument can be criticized for begging the question; that is, it assumes, at the outset, the very thing it purports to prove. Still, when you think about it, the argument is not nearly as simpleminded as it appears. Just where did you get your idea of a Perfect Being if you’re so sure no such thing exists?
THE TELEOLOGICAL ARGUMENT, OR THE ARGUMENT FROM DESIGN: You’ve probably heard this one before. The gist of it is that simply by looking around you can see that the world is a strange and wondrous place, something like an enormous machine with millions of perfectly made and perfectly interlocking parts. Now, nobody but an underground filmmaker would claim that such a structure could be the result of mere chance. For metaphysicians from Plato and Aristotle to eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers, enamored of the mechanical symmetry of the universe, and nineteenth-century ones, enamored of the biological complexity of same, the idea that there had to be a Mind behind all this magnificent order seemed pretty obvious. The teleological argument survived for so long partly because the world is a pretty amazing place, and partly because the argument’s validity never depended on the idea that God is omniscient or omnipotent, only that He’s a better planner than the rest of us. However, as Hume, the great debunker, was to point out, even if we could assume the existence of a Cosmic Architect who was marginally better at putting it all together than we are, such a mediocre intelligence, which allowed for so many glitches in the plan, would hardly constitute God. And then along came the mathematicians again, pointing out that, according to theories of chance and probability, the cosmos just might be an accident after all.
What You Need to Know Before
Answering a Personals Ad in the
International Herald Tribune ARGENTINA
THE LAYOUT: South America’s second-biggest country (after Brazil), with topography ranging from subtropical forests (the Gran Chaco, near the Paraguayan border) to windblown steppes and melting glaciers (Patagonia, home of some sheep, a lot of oil rigs, and a brand-new outcropping of luxury resorts). Argentina shares the island of Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of the Americas, with Chile, and refuses to relinquish its claim to the little group of islands known as the Falklands (Argentines call them the Malvinas) despite its resounding loss to the British, who’d been occupying and administering the islands for 150 years, in the 1982 Falklands War. Argentina has plenty of rich farmland, mineral deposits galore, and, at its top and bottom, wide-open spaces. That’s because most Argentines have gone off to live in the pampa, the central grasslands where the gauchos used to roam, the cattle still graze, the wheat grows, and most of the manufacturing is done. In fact, nearly 40 percent of them have set up housekeeping in a few square miles of the pampa over by the coast, in the present capital, Buenos Aires, Argentina’s version of Paris, ditto Miami Beach, where those who are not busy blockading highways or sifting through garbage for food can enjoy the views from their high-rise apartments and dream of Swiss bank accounts waiting beyond the horizon.
THE SYSTEM: Well, it’s a federal republic for sure, comprising twenty-three provinces and a federal district; beyond that, it depends on what day of the week this is. Between 1939 and 1983, Argentina went through twenty-four presidents and twenty-six successful military coups (as well as hundreds of unsuccessful ones); during the economic crisis of 2001–2002, five different presidents came and went within two weeks. Stability, as foreign investors have learned, is not among Argentina’s many attractive qualities. Argentines, for their part, have become accustomed to having their constitutional rights dictated from above or suspended altogether. With a history of rule by caudillos—those legendary Latin strongmen with the long sideburns and the private armies—and by the kind of military junta that shoots first and asks you to state your business later, they’ve come to regard a little repression as almost reassuring; it’s taken as a sign that, at least, someone is in charge. Argentina is currently governed by a president and vice president elected for four-year terms. At the moment, they are still reasonably popular with the citizenry. Stay tuned.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO READ THE NEWSPAPERS: That the key question is: What’s a nice middle-class country like you doing in a mess like this? Up until about twenty-five years ago Argentina was the poster child for Latin American prosperity. Blessed with abundant natural resources, a large middle class, and an educated workforce, the country had the seventh-largest economy in the world. And indeed, throughout much of the 1990s, Armani suits and Vuitton bags blossomed like wildflowers among the sidewalk cafés of Buenos Aires. Argentines will tell you that what happened was something called the “Washington Consensus,” an economic policy strongly encouraged by the IMF that called for removing trade barriers, privatizing major industries, opening the country to foreign investors, and pegging the peso to the dollar. By the end of the decade, local industries were bankrupt, Argentina’s exports had priced themselves out of the global marketplace, and more than 20 percent of the country’s workforce was collecting unemployment. Meanwhile, the peso was on life support, battered by recession in the United States and the sheer unsustainability of pretending to be a dollar when you’re really a peso. Much of Argentina’s once-robust working class had spent the last few years lining up at soup kitchens, and now the middle class crowded in behind them; more than half the population of Argentina was living below the poverty level. In the winter of 2001, things came to a head when the government froze bank accounts and people heading to their ATMs found “Sorry” notices instead of cash. Thousands of people took to the streets banging pots and pans, a couple dozen people were killed, and the government collapsed. Two weeks and five presidents later, the ruckus finally began to settle after the former governor of Patagonia, Néstor Kirchner, assumed office and inherited, along with a country in the midst of a nervous breakdown, the largest sovereign debt default in the history of the world.
By the way, expect to be confused by the frequent, contradictory references to Peronism, named for the ultimate caudillo, Juan Domingo Perón, and to the Peronist Party, which dominated Argentine politics and defined a version of the Argentine dream from the 1940s through the 1970s and which is represented today, however unfaithfully, by the current president. Even in Perón’s day, Peronism was an incoherent muddle of nationalism, socialism, fascism, anti-imperialism, and ferocious anti-Americanism supported by an unlikely mix of social cadres— factory workers, church leaders, army officers, right-wingers of various persuasions—that normally wouldn’t allow their kids to run on the same playground. What held Peronism together was the personal charisma of Juan Domingo and especially of his wife Eva, a.k.a. Evita, who was a sort of cross between Marlene Dietrich, Edith Piaf, and Eleanor Roosevelt. The movement drastically increased the power of labor unions and other special interests, bankrupted the country, and gave rise to Argentina’s large and perennially discontented middle class. “Peronism” is still the vague umbrella term for the nation’s power elite, though there is not much alignment among them on issues of national concern, and the party has now been renamed the Justicialista Party.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW IF YOU’RE DATING AN ARGENTINE: Does your date live in Buenos Aires? Would that be the city proper or the surrounds? It makes a difference. If your date lives in the city, you might want to bring along all the clothes you don’t wear anymore to trade for bedlinens or motor oil at the city’s ubiquitous barter clubs, after which you might stop in for a light supper at one of the many local soup kitchens. Working-class Argentines began to band together for sustenance when the job market went south, and middle-class Argentines joined them when the peso did the same. The result was an enormous grassroots movement of barter, neighborhood associations, and worker takeovers of abandoned factories that led to euphoria among Latin American left-wingers, who believed they were witnessing the dawn of a new utopian society. Dream on, dudes. Nowadays, you can still leave your American Express card home and barter for just about everything you nee
d—including a haircut or a session with one of Buenos Aires’ gazillion psychotherapists—and most neighborhoods still run their own soup kitchens, but with the economy showing signs of improvement and the president talking tough to Argentina’s creditors, daily life has settled into a somewhat threadbare version of its old self. In fact, whether your date is rich or semi-broke, you can expect to spend a night or two at one of the tango palaces that are booming in Buenos Aires these days.
However, if your date’s address is somewhere in the city’s vast outlying areas, bring nothing, unless you’re willing to risk outshining your date, and plan to spend most of your time building roadblocks and burning tires along with the other piqueteros—the great unemployed masses—on the city’s major thoroughfares. Three times the number of residents of Buenos Aires proper live in the villas miserias on the outskirts of town. Once the frontline of mass protest, they have now been reduced to a national nuisance by a government that’s been cunning enough to use spin rather than shooting to overcome its opposition.
Of course, your date may be one of the lucky—or better yet, well-connected— Argentines who stashed an estimated $100 billion in overseas banks before the recession hit. In that case, pack your favorite Guccis and Chanels and plan on partying like it’s, um, 1994.
