Derrida and Orwell versus the Modern Utilitarian Reader: CAGE MATCH.

People who read for information, rather than the ample other reasons people read, are immediately noticeable. These men (usually male) devour books without decorum, just to wash them down with articles they find online. Their information is presented in a stew of knowledge, kept warm within the oven of a wisdom which is totally pragmatic, literal, and martial. If they have an inner life, they seldom show it; if they’re shown their inner life, they publicize this same exposure as betrayal, well before the private information can turn public. What they serve may be seasoned with wit, but it is poisoned with manipulation, and the culinary breadth of knowledge they profess remains wanting of depth and taste, so much so that the “privileged” palate notices, but most eat it up.

The Orwellian Theory of Language and the Derridean Theory of Language are not one and the same, but neither are they rivals, much less mortal adversaries in a moral war.

Orwell contends that Truth is literal and metaphysical, that it can be observed within the physical domain, (though not all metaphysical reality can be, at least outside of Orwell’s universe) and that there is a practice of its faithful presentation through verbal representation. Words, to Orwell, carry meanings which phrases do not, and by accounting for these meanings carefully one can deduce not only what words mean within a phrase, but also what they’re MEANT to mean and the intent of the man using them.

To Derrida, however, words don’t hold a stable ground in metaphysical or physical Reality. “Truth” is a function of language itself, a futile gesture in a world devoid of any Truth intrinsically. All that words do is seek to represent some PART of a Reality which ultimately can’t be fathomed verbally, and in the careful use of words we dress each other up in lenses which are always skewed to serve some partial point of view.

Both men are seeking the same thing, apparently: one to undo the lies of politicians by pursuing Truth and its most faithful rendering, the other to undo the lies of culture and philosophers by severing Truth from the World, reducing it to merely partial renderings which constantly must be unfaithful, by their very nature.

Between these two camps walks the modern ideologue, seeking to salvage Orwell’s optimism in an age of post-Derridean confusion, preaching “field meanings” and reprimanding propaganda. To the reader who reads purely for political utility, words MUST carry specific, Orwellian meanings, as well as even more deviously Orwellian histories of (and possibilities for their further) misuse. The moment that one reads “too much into” them, one has “read too much”, and this indulgence is a sin. Utilitarian representation protects the proletariat; disinterested learning serves the bourgeoise.

Yet the Derridean contends, ambiguously, that it is impossible to “read too much”. Utility itself is suspect in manipulating language just to push its own one-sided picture of the “Truth”; circumlocution and euphemism are by no means peculiar to Deconstruction.

[({Dm.R.G.)}]