At 01:44 1/09/99 -0400, Carl Remick wrote:
>> [From Kirsten Nielsen. There's also some thumbsucking about the
>> meaning of Derrida in the piece, including some bleats from Roger
>> Scruton about godlessness and meaninglessness.]
>
>Not to return to the Judith Butler inferno of many months ago, but I
>certainly endorse this criticism, found in this piece: "John Raulston
>Saul could not be described as conservative, but like Scruton, he has
>problems with Derrida, arguing that he is obscure, and therefore likely
>to castrate the public imagination. Clarity is always the method of
>those who serve the public imagination, he says, claiming that obscure
>writers serve what he calls 'established power'."
I've just been reading Pierre Bourdieu's _On Television and Journalism_, a book in which I think you and many people on this list would find a lot to agree with. In the many prefaces and introductions and other frames to this short book, Bourdieu emphasises the problem of the way in which journalism and television allow the articulation or demonstration of only those things which can be clearly related to existing knowledge and explained in under 5 minutes (or, he says, referring to US politics, under 7 seconds).
In this very article which Kirsten fwds and on which you are, I guess, commenting, Derrida says something fairly similar about his own work. That he wants to say things that can't be explained in 5 minutes and which aren't already held to be self evident. Faced with the 'accusation' that people may not understand him he suggests they will 'understand enough to understand more'.
Now I've never been a fan of Derrida (and much of this article is tritely concerned with 'Derrida fandom'), and I have a number of problems with Bourdieu's _On Television..._ as well, but this point seems to me to be fair enough. 'Clarity' can all too often be a description of the unsurprising, the comfortable and the overly simplistic.
Catherine