Deconstruction
This is a trendy
term,
used in
popular discussions, but there is a more technical sense in which it is
used too, as we shall see. In normal discussions, it means we are going
to take an argument to bits and see how it works, challenge its
assumptions, question its findings and so on. Since all arguments are
socially contructed, the argument goes, it should be possible to
decontruct them. No problems -- in fact you could see all the
techniques we suggest here as decontructionist in this general
sense. However to really push the idea you need a French philsosopher...
Derrida has been a terribly influential philosopher in his particular
field, and in literary analysis. I am going to link him initially with Adorno
because I am simply going to take one tiny bit of his work. Adorno and
Derrida do not really belong together in any sense except they are both
steeped in reading the classics of German philosophy (and both
have a really difficult style, with very elaborate sentences, word
play, and frequent references to philosophers I have not read, often in
Latin, Greek and German). However, Derrida is associated with a word
that lots of people have heard -- deconstruction.
I am going to use him here to support the view that concepts never
simply apply to objects in the real world, and that philosophers,
scientists and writers have to force them to do so, often suppressing
the assumptions or judgments made. Adorno focuses on
how objects are simplified and domesticated through the various rituals
of science, from operationalism to laboratory procedure (and we
might add statistical analysis using standard formulae). We can start
to understand how Derrida might fit by suggesting that he works the
other way around, on theory.
Theory, even well-developed philosophical theories, are riddled with a
number of assumptions that involve what we have called 'identity
thinking'. These assumptions work not to make concepts fit reality as
in Adorno,but to make concepts fit other concepts, ideas or thoughts as
some sort of direct expression of them. There are several examples of
this sort of assumption. My personal favourite is Derrida's close
analysis of Freud's work on dreams showing that the language of dreams
does not directly tap into material swirling around in the unconscious.
This is often assumed when people think that Freud is arguing that
dreams just symbolise unconscious desires in a predictable properly
coded way -- that every time you dream of a fireplace it is a symbol of
female genitals, for example. But there is no formula or Rosetta Stone.
Instead, the Unconscious assembles the
materials which appear in dreams in a much more primitive and less
regular fashion, making simple coding unreliable.
However , classic semiotics
is a more
relevant example, possibly. It begins by saying that the sign actually
contains two elements -- signifier and signified -- which are
intimately related. Derrida wants to criticise the apparent unity
between these two, though , and to argue that quite a good deal of
creative work is involved in making them fit together perfectly. I am
not saying that the gap between signifier and signified is a large or
simple
gap, like the one between a label and the object you are going to
stick the label on, but there is a kind of gap nonetheless. This
creative work has a general name -- 'writing'. It is suppressed
or repressed in the philosophical work of semioticians (and just about
everyone else) . The relation
between signifier and signified, the meaning of the sign, is just
immediately given or present. It is usually just announced before the
real work of analysis starts - the relations between signs. Derrida
wants to go back a stage though.
These assumptions of immediate presence are deeply grounded in the
whole tradition of Western philosophy, and much of Derrida's work
involves a detailed reading of the classics by Hegel, Heidegger,
Husserl, Freud and others to show how these assumptions work to
simplify matters at crucial stages. This work, roughly speaking, is
what Derrida means by deconstruction. It involves rooting around in the
collective unconsciousness of philosophy and philosophers to force them
to reflect on what they would rather not reflect about -- bits that
actually negate what they are arguing, that remain completely outside
the sceheme of things.
To do full deconstruction in the Derrida sense requires an awful lot of
care, deep reading and experience. It would be quite time-consuming,
and probably not really worth the effort for our purposes, because it
will be relatively easy to detect 'writing' in ordinary language
statements anyway. Only in philosophy does it become difficult to
winkle out this repressed activity. If we want to criticise just
policy, I
suppose we can get a few simple points from Derrida instead:
1. We should recognise that concepts cannot simply be glued onto
objects in one direction, nor thoughts or ideas in the other. Nothing
fits perfectly. There is a work of adjustment required. Many of us can
notice the step between general theoretical analysis and the actual
'application' of this theory to specific cases. Sometimes it causes a
moment's panic or uncertainty because we can't immediately see why the
analysis has taken the turn it has. But this is not the place to give
up and think the author knows best -- it may be the site of some
suppressed 'writing'.
2. If we read carefully, and once we have got a bit of experience, we
can start to see hints or traces of how this work of adjustment has
operated behind the scenes. There will be contradictions or slightly
different uses of terms. There will be adjustments, including shifting
definitions of key terms. There will be dilemmas on or just beneath the
surface of the most confident statement. These will include how general
terms are actually applied to specific cases. Alternatives will be
suppressed.
In both cases, then, a substantial amount of critical work can be done
to open up the text and recover what has been glossed over.
contents page
|
|
|