I am struck by a kind of humor in the way that writing (text and whatever essential knowledge lives within it) is often placed in relation to the person experiencing it, and what that correspondence means for the person—specifically, whether something is being gained or added to the human’s cognitive capacity or feeling of self, or whatever other metric one wants to use.

I think a fundamental view that we are often raised with is that education (note: definitely a meritocracy) is about self-enrichment and that

a. either our reservoir of understanding is this vessel of infinite capacity that we can endlessly continue to fill up, or that

b. if it has a fixed capacity, that which goes in it is diluted or morphed, eventually yielding the end product of some completely refined, “correct”, pure understanding.

On page 9 of “What is Theory?” Culler provides a quick walk through one of Derrida’s deconstructive passages, and there is a focus on the use of the word supplement:

“Rousseau follows this tradition, which has passed into common sense, when he writes ‘Languages are made to be spoken; writing serves only as a supplement to speech.’ Here Derrida intervenes, asking ‘what is a supplement?’ Webster’s defines supplement as ‘something that completes of makes an addition’. Does writing ‘complete’ speech by supplying something essential that was missing, or does it add something that speech could perfectly well do without?”

Without attempting to deeply explain Derrida, something I am far from ready to even walk the perimeter of, what I get is that there is a deep concern with the nature of the thing being discussed, and a fear that even attempting to delineate something is prone to corrupting it or yielding a pointless endeavor.

With the question of our ability to get at this underlying thing held in mind, I find thinking about our lifelong education—a process that is now, for many, past the decade (and a half) mark and might even continue. So many books ingested, and ideas digested (maybe) and—how much further along are we, really? Has book learning supplied that essential something? Has it given us something we could have done without? Have the contents of our mind-vessel increased since the start of the process?

Which is all why I chuckled at Eagleton’s cynicism when he writes on page 2142, in a wash of steady sarcasm, of how a “Victorian writer speaks of literature as opening a ‘serene and luminous region of truth where all may meet and expatiate in common’, above ‘the smoke and stir, the din and turmoil of man’s lower life of care and business and debate”. The phrase “moral riches of bourgeoisie civilization” elicited a similar reaction. Literature, in a way, acts in the same way as a magician’s sleight of hand might.

At the bottom of 2143, he drives the point home, elucidating that “the actually impoverished experience of the mass of people can be supplemented by literature”; this blunt point on his Marxist-y thesis of how “English” education—not philology or the Classic canon of Oxbridge’s traditions—was created by Victorian aristocracy to subtly contain a middle and working class and mold its worldview, beckoning it into the hall of higher mental meditation in hopes of quieting the hellish buzzing of a life lived within alienated labor.

My conclusion isn’t so serious and nothing in my epistemological foundation crumbles to shards—I’m not so devoted to this poststructuralist project that I can’t contain myself—but this remains humorous; as to think that this sweet subject (“English Literature”), one I just can’t stop enrolling in, was introduced to the academic grounds as a way of wicking our understanding away from the thing and closer to whatever else suits the commandeering cause of the ruling powers; Eagleton fortunately calls it like it is: “the survival of private property”.