Restoring criticisms of deconstructionism that are actually made. Disagreement with them does not equal their non-existence. |
adding deconstruction in architecture |
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** ''Of Grammatology''. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. |
** ''Of Grammatology''. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. |
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* Eagleton, Terry. ''Literary Theory: An Introduction''. |
* Eagleton, Terry. ''Literary Theory: An Introduction''. |
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==Deconstruction in architecture== |
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Deconstruction has greatly influenced the field of architecture, philosophically inspiring a new style, also called Deconstruction. Sometimes it is also called Deconstructivism -after its formal inspiration from the Russian [[Constructivism]] movement of the 1920's. It is a contemporary style that primarily counters the ordered rationality of [[Modern architecture]]. The underpinnings of this movement include ideas of fragmentation, non-linear processes of design, non-Euclidean geometry, negating polarities such as structure and envelope, and so on. Some prominent architects who practise in this mode are [[Peter Eisenmann]], [[Bernard Tshumi]] and [[Zaha Hadid]]. The final visual appearance of buildings in this style are characterised by a stimulating unpredictability and a controlled chaos. However, critics of Deconstruction see it as a purely formal exercise with little social significance. |
Revision as of 16:41, 5 September 2003
In literary criticism and Continental philosophy, deconstruction refers to to a post-structuralist philosophical movement initiated by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida, and more broadly to the critical reading of texts in a manner similar to Derrida's. In everyday use, deconstruction is a synonym for criticism, analysis, debunking, or commentary with an overtone of questioning motives, conscious or otherwise, for producing a work; occasionally it is simply a synonym for "destruction." The latter, everyday, meaning has a tenuous relation, if any, to the former, philosophical, meaning. The rest of this article focuses on the former, more narrowly philosophical sense of the term.
(A terminological note: Practicing philosophers and literary scholars with Derridean or deconstructive points of view describe themselves, or more often their work, as "deconstructive." In contrast, the more dogmatic-sounding adjective "deconstructionist," which along with related "-ism" and "-istic" forms is sometimes found in journalism, is rarely used by knowledgeable writers. "Deconstructor" is occasionally used as an alternative way of referring to a deconstructive thinker.)
The project of deconstruction
Jacques Derrida described his post-structuralist philosophical project using the term "deconstruction." Other well-known scholars and critics who have worked in deconstruction include Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Paul de Man, Jonathan Culler, Barbara Johnson, and J. Hillis Miller.
A precise and simple definition of deconstruction is impossible: the relevant philosophical texts amount to hundreds, if not thousands, of pages. Most of the texts of deconstruction are difficult reading, and resistant to summary, by their nature. The writing's difficulty and idiosyncratic style is claimed by sympathetic readers to be essential to a proper treatment of its subject (but many unsympathetic readers have called it everything from obscurantism to outright nonsense). In addition, deconstruction is based on a close reading of difficult founding texts by such philosophers as Plato, Rousseau, and Husserl. Derrida's ideas have also been applied to many other sorts of texts, especially to literature. Derrida's work, and deconstruction, have had a profound effect on literary theory and continental philosophy.
Deconstruction's central concern is a radical critique of the Enlightenment project and of metaphysics. Deconstruction identifies in the Western philosophical tradition a metaphysics of presence (also known as logocentrism) which holds that perfect communication is possible, that absolute truth or self-identity exist as grounds for meaning.
An early translator of Derrida (the philosopher David B. Allison) explained the term "deconstruction" as follows:
- It signifies a project of critical thought whose task is to locate and "take apart" those concepts which serve as the axioms or rules for a period of thought, those concepts which command the unfolding of an entire epoch of metaphysics. "Deconstruction" is somewhat less negative than the Heideggerian or Nietzschean terms "destruction" or "reversal"; it suggests that certain foundational concepts of metaphysics will never be entirely eliminated...There is no simple "overcoming" of metaphysics or the language of metaphysics. (Introduction to Speech and Phenomena, p. xxxii, n. 1)
Différance
Against the metaphysics of presence, deconstruction brings an idea called différance. This French neologism is, on the deconstructive argument, properly neither a word nor a concept; it names the non-coincidence of meaning both synchronically (one French homonym means "differing") and diachronically (another means "deferring", unlike in English; this is why différance is written as a French word rather than rendered "differance" in English translation).
In simple terms, this means that rather than privileging commonality and simplicity and seeking unifying principles (or grand teleological narratives, or overarching concepts, etc.) deconstruction empasizes difference, complexity, and non-self-identity. A deconstructive reading of a text, or a deconstructive interpretation of philosophy (for deconstruction tends to ellide any difference between the two), often seeks to demonstrate how a seemingly unitary idea or concept contains different or opposing meanings within itself. The ellision of difference in philosophical concepts is even referred to in deconstruction as a kind of violence, the idea being that theory's willful misdescription or simplification of reality always does violence to the true richness and complexity of the world. This criticism can be taken as a rejection of the philosophical law of the excluded middle, arguing that the simple oppositions of Aristotelian logic force a false appearance of simplicity onto a recalcitrant world.
Binary oppositions
One typical procedure of deconstruction is its critique of binary oppositions. A central deconstructive argument holds that, in all the classic dualities of Western thought, one term is privileged over the other. Examples include:
- speech over writing
- presence over absence
- identity over difference
- fullness over emptiness
- meaning over meaninglessness
- mastery over submission
- life over death
Derrida argues in Of Grammatology (translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and published in English in 1976) that, in each such case, the first term is classically conceived as original, authentic, and superior, while the second is thought of as secondary, derivative, or even "parasitic." These binary oppositions, and others of their form, he argues, must be deconstructed.
This deconstruction is effected in stages. First, Derrida suggests, the opposition must be inverted, and the second, traditionally subordinate term must be privileged. He argues that these oppositions cannot be simply transcended; given the thousands of years of philosophical history behind them, it would be disingenuous to attempt to move directly to a domain of thought beyond these distinctions. So deconstruction attempts to compensate for these historical power imbalances, undertaking the difficult project of thinking through the philosophical implications of reversing them.
Only after this task is undertaken (if not completed, which may be impossible), Derrida argues, can philosophy begin to conceive a conceptual terrain outside these oppositions: the next project of deconstruction would be to develop concepts which fall under neither one term of these oppositions nor the other. Much of the philosophical work of deconstruction has been devoted to developing such ideas and their implications, of which différance may be the prototype (as it denotes neither simple identity nor simple difference). Derrida spoke in an interview (first published in French in 1967) about such "concepts," which he called merely "marks" in order to distinguish them from proper philosophical concepts:
- ...[I]t has been necessary to analyze, to set to work, within the text of the history of philosophy, as well as within the so-called literary text,..., certain marks, shall we say,... that by analogy (I underline) I have called undecidables, that is, unities of simulacrum, "false" verbal properties (nominal or semantic) that can no longer be included within philosophical (binary) opposition, resisting and disorganizing it, without ever constituting a third term, without ever leaving room for a solution in the form of speculative dialectics. (Positions, trans. Alan Bass, pp. 42-43)
As can be seen in this discussion of its terms' undecidable, unresolvable complexity, deconstruction requires a high level of comfort with suspended, deferred decision; a deconstructive thinker must be willing to work with terms whose precise meaning has not been, and perhaps cannot be, established. (This is often given as a major reason for the difficult writing style of deconstructive texts.) Critics of deconstruction find this unacceptable as philosophy; many feel that, by working in this manner with unspecified terms, deconstruction ignores the primary task of philosophy, which they say is the creation and elucidation of concepts. This deep criticism is a result of a fundamental difference of opinion about the nature of philosophy, and is unlikely to be resolved simply.
An illustration: Derrida's reading of Lévi-Strauss
A more concrete example, drawn from one of Derrida's most famous works, may help to clarify the typical manner in which deconstruction works.
Structuralist analysis generally relies on the search for underlying binary oppositions as an explanatory device. The structuralist anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss argued that such oppositions are found in all cultures, not only in Western culture, and thus that the device of binary opposition was fundamental to meaning.
Deconstruction challenges the explanatory value of these oppositions. This method has three steps. The first step is to reveal an asymmetry in the binary opposition, suggesting an implied hierarchy. The second step is to reverse the hierarchy. The third step is to displace one of the terms of the opposition, often in the form of a new and expanded definition.
In his book Of Grammatology, Derrida offers one example of deconstruction applied to a theory of Lévi-Strauss. Following many other Western thinkers, Lévi-Strauss distinguished between "savage" societies lacking writing and "civilized" societies that have writing. This distinction implies that human beings developed verbal communication (speech) before some human cultures developed writing, and that speech is thus conceptually as well as chronologically prior to writing (thus speech would be more authentic, closer to truth and meaning, and more immediate than writing).
Although the development of writing is generally considered to be an advance, after an encounter with the Nambikwara Indians of Brazil, Lévi-Strauss suggested that societies without writing were also lacking violence and domination (in other words, savages are truly noble savages). He further argued that the primary function of writing is to facilitate slavery (or social inequality, exploitation, and domination in general). (This claim has been rejected by most later historians and anthropologists as incorrect. There is abundant historical evidence that both hunter-gatherer societies and later non-literate tribes had significant amounts of violence and warfare in their cultures.)
Derrida's interpretation begins with taking Lévi-Strauss's discussion of writing at its word: what is important in writing for Lévi-Strauss is not the use of markings on a piece of paper to communicate information, but rather their use in domination and violence. Derrida further observes that, based on Lévi-Strauss's own ethnography, the Nambikwara really do use language for domination and violence. Derrida thus concludes that writing, in fact, is prior to speech. That is, he reverses the opposition between speech and writing.
Derrida was not making fun of Lévi-Strauss, nor did he mean to supercede, replace, or proclaim himself superior to Lévi-Strauss. (A common theme of deconstruction is the desire to be critical without assuming a posture of superiority.) He was using his deconstruction of Lévi-Strauss to question a common belief in Western culture, dating back at least to Plato: that speech is prior to, more authentic than, and closer to "true meaning" than writing.
A disclaimer
This article's discussion of deconstructive thought should be considered a gross oversimplification. Deconstruction is vulnerable to misunderstanding even when carefully and sympathetically summarized, perhaps more than other philosophy, because of its emphasis on irreducible complexity and its texts' often difficult style. (This is one reason why deconstruction is often misunderstood, and why deconstructive thinkers are often criticized for positions that they have not actually taken.) Derrida himself often refers to introductory summaries (such as the descriptions above of différance and the deconstruction of binary opposition) as "pedagogical" oversimplifications, which may be necessary but are ultimately in some degree false.
Those interested in learning more about deconstruction would be well advised to seek introductory texts, which are available in a range of complexity beginning with comic-book introductions, proceeding through introductory texts (like Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction, Peter Barry's Beginning Theory, or numerous others), to academic works written in a more easily approachable style than Derrida's (such as Jonathan Culler's influential book On Deconstruction.) There is, of course, ultimately no substitute for reading Derrida's writing itself (of course, this is true for all philosophy), but some prior orientation to the relevant issues and terms can make reading Derrida less difficult.
Criticisms of deconstruction
Critics of deconstruction often believe it to advocate irrationalism, absolute relativism, radical social constructivism, opposition to science or history, anti-realism, subjectivism, and/or solipsism. None of these claims is supported by a careful reading of Derrida's work (or any other eminent texts of deconstruction). The goal of such arguments is often a broader indictment of post-modernism based on the work of Lyotard, Baudrillard, or other writers relatively uninvolved with deconstruction. Cultural critics' writings on science, mathematics, and history have often proved controversial, sparking what some historians refer to as a war against truth and history, and what some scientists see as a war against science and logic. Again, most such criticisms are actually aimed at a much broader post-modernism, while some, but relatively few, bear specifically on deconstruction. The philosopher Christopher Norris delineates this difference in books such as What's Wrong With Post-Modernism and Deconstruction and the "Unfinished Project of Modernity". Norris argues for the importance of deconstruction to philosophy and to the philosophy of science, but is quite hostile to post-modernism.
Some claim that deconstruction is primarily a means of academic empire-building, making literary critiques seem more potent and exclusive than they would otherwise be. Even if this criticism is valid, now-discarded academic fads of the past have nevertheless produced important and lasting work. The application of psychoanalysis to American anthropology in the 1930s and American literary studies in the 1950s are examples. And some scholars separate the two, claiming that the rise in deconstruction's popularity in American literary studies (along with other forms of post-structuralist "high theory" in the 1970s) and its subsequent decline (in the late 1980s and early 1990s) were largely external to the development of the theory, whose authors simply embraced their newfound popularity as most people would.
For some critics, deconstruction's frequent insistence on unresolvable complexity, and its reliance on terms whose conceptual status and definition are unclear, exclude it from the proper domain of philosophy. Deconstruction's complete rejection of teleology renders accounts of historical progress (and indeed the entire philosophy of history) considerably more difficult to sustain, leading some to reject it on political grounds. (The relation between deconstruction and Marxism, Marxist theory, and Marxist philosophy is particularly complex and fraught with numerous disagreements and attempted reconciliations.)
The writing of deconstructionists is rather inaccessible, containing word play, acrobatic interpretation of texts, and other features that invite criticisms.
Derrida's writings, especially from the late 1970s to the early 1980s were quite inaccessible and eccentric. He went so far to actually claim, for example, that punning on the name of a poet is a good way of getting at the meaning of a poem. This effort to revive the process of thinking by violating commonly held assumptions of relevance and coherence is also considered a deconstruction.
All major deconstructionist beliefs have been disputed by many historians, linguists, and literary scholars.
- Deconstructionists believe that no one can know the truth about the intentions of an author. This deconstructionist belief is refuted, because the experience of authors demonstrates that most writings do have specific intentions, and the authors themselves many times note that readers are able to accurately understand their intentions. Unless deconstructionists accuse most authors of lying when they claim that their works are properly understood, there is no way they can support their beliefs.
- No one can know anything about the true nature of reality. Some deconstructionists write that there is no objective reality "out there", and that reality is a social construct. This belief is often rejected as a disguised version of solipsism.
- No claim of knowledge is privileged; no method of learning provides authoritative information. This deconstructionist belief is rejected on its face; the articles on Knowledge, science and history give explanations of why most people believe that there are reliable ways of learning information.
- A central concept of deconstructionism is that language has no inherent meaning. This belief is rejected on its face; if this was true, then how could anyone ever agree with deconstructionist writers? How could deconstructionist writers themselves disagree with others?
A common rebuttal to all deconstructionist dogma is that deconstructionists effectively claim a privileged position for their own writings. They write letters and books which expect that readers understand their own intent, yet deny that this is possible for anyone else. MIT Linguist Noam Chomsky has written a strong refutation of deconstructionism and related philosophies.
- I have spent a lot of my life working on questions such as these, using the only methods I know of--those condemned here as "science," "rationality," "logic," and so on. I therefore read the papers with some hope that they would help me "transcend" these limitations, or perhaps suggest an entirely different course. I'm afraid I was disappointed. Admittedly, that may be my own limitation. Quite regularly, "my eyes glaze over" when I read polysyllabic discourse on the themes of poststructuralism and postmodernism; what I understand is largely truism or error, but that is only a fraction of the total word count. True, there are lots of other things I don't understand: the articles in the current issues of math and physics journals, for example. But there is a difference. In the latter case, I know how to get to understand them, and have done so, in cases of particular interest to me; and I also know that people in these fields can explain the contents to me at my level, so that I can gain what (partial) understanding I may want. In contrast, no one seems to be able to explain to me why the latest post-this-and-that is (for the most part) other than truism, error, or gibberish, and I do not know how to proceed.
Noam Chomsky on Rationality/Science - From Z Papers Special Issue
History of deconstruction
During the period between the late 1960s and the early 1980s many thinkers influenced by deconstruction, including Derrida, Paul de Man, Geoffrey Hartman, and J. Hillis Miller, worked at Yale University. This group came to be known as the Yale school and was especially influential in literary criticism, as de Man, Miller, and Hartman were all primarily literary critics. Several of these theorists were subsequently affiliated with the University of California Irvine.
(More detailed institutional history could be added here.)
Precursors
Deconstruction has significant ties with much of Western philosophy; even considering only Derrida's work, there are existing deconstructive texts about the works of at least many dozens of important philosophers. However, deconstruction emerged from a clearly delineated philosophical context:
- Derrida's earliest work, including the texts that introduced the term "deconstruction," dealt with the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl: Derrida's first publication was a book-length Introduction to Husserl's The Origin of Geometry, and Speech and Phenomena, an early work, dealt largely with phenomenology.
- A student and prior interpreter of Husserl's, Martin Heidegger, was one of the most significant influences on Derrida's thought: Derrida's Of Spirit deals directly with Heidegger, but Heidegger's influence on deconstruction is much broader than that one volume.
- The psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud is an important reference for much of deconstruction: The Post Card, important essays in Writing and Difference, Archive Fever, and many other deconstructive works deal primarily with Freud.
- The work of Friedrich Nietzsche is a forerunner of deconstruction in form and substance, as Derrida writes in Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles.
- The structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure, and other forms of post-structuralism that evolved contemporaneously with deconstruction (such as the work of Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, etc.), were the immediate intellectual climate for the formation of deconstruction. In many cases, these authors were close friends, colleagues, or correspondents of Derrida's.
References
See also: Jacques Derrida -- Paul de Man -- Yale school (deconstruction) -- structuralism -- Post-structuralism -- Cultural movement -- Post-modernism -- Continental philosophy -- feminism -- feminist theory -- literary theory -- literary criticism -- psychoanalysis -- phenomenology
External links
Books and articles
- Culler, Jonathan. On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism.
- Derrida, Jacques. Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs. Trans. David B. Allison. Evanston: Northwestern U.P., 1973.
- Positions. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U. of Chicago Press, 1981.
- Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.
- Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction.
Deconstruction in architecture
Deconstruction has greatly influenced the field of architecture, philosophically inspiring a new style, also called Deconstruction. Sometimes it is also called Deconstructivism -after its formal inspiration from the Russian Constructivism movement of the 1920's. It is a contemporary style that primarily counters the ordered rationality of Modern architecture. The underpinnings of this movement include ideas of fragmentation, non-linear processes of design, non-Euclidean geometry, negating polarities such as structure and envelope, and so on. Some prominent architects who practise in this mode are Peter Eisenmann, Bernard Tshumi and Zaha Hadid. The final visual appearance of buildings in this style are characterised by a stimulating unpredictability and a controlled chaos. However, critics of Deconstruction see it as a purely formal exercise with little social significance.