Annotations ¶
“The ‘de-’ of deconstruction signifies not the demolition of what is constructing itself, but rather what remains to be thought beyond the constructionist or destructionist schema.”
“The de- of deconstruction,” as Derrida has said quite explicitly (and on more than one occasion), “signifies not the demolition of what is constructing itself, but rather what remains to be thought beyond the constructionist or destructionist schema.”10 Deconstruction, therefore, identifies something entirely other than what is commonly understood and delimited by the conceptual opposition situated between, for example, the assumed positive term “construction” and its negation “destruction.”
“Deconstruction” is not negative. The word does not indicate “to take apart,” “to un-construct,” or “to disassemble.”
But deconstruction is not analysis, and Derrida is quite direct and emphatic on this point. The process, values, and objectives of analysis—namely, the decomposition, dissection, and reduction of some larger whole into its simple, fundamental components—is itself something that is to be deconstructed. In other words, what deconstruction deconstructs (if one may be permitted this kind of recursive statement) is the conceptual difference that distinguishes part from whole, simple from complex, and assembly from decomposition. Instead of being another name for analysis, deconstruction critically reevaluates the fundamental arrangement and operations of any and all forms of analysis.
“Deconstruction is not a method and cannot be transformed into one.”22 This is because methods, as Rodolphe Gasché explains, “are generally understood as roads (from hodos: ‘way,’ ‘road’) to knowledge. In the sciences—as well as in the philosophies that scientific thinking patronizes—method is an instrument for representing a given field, and it is applied to the field from the outside.”23 Conceptualized in this fashion, methods are both instrumental and subjective.
Methods are instrumental in that they describe a standard procedure or set of discrete steps that can be followed for producing a particular outcome. “A good method,” as J. Hillis Miller explains in his book For Derrida, “follows after a track implicitly already laid out as a sure way to get where you want to go, that is, to a goal that is already there, waiting for you to get there.”24
“Deconstruction does not exist somewhere, pure, proper, self-identical, outside of its inscriptions in conflictual and differentiated contexts; it ‘is’ only what it does and what is done with it, there where it takes place.”25 Consequently, there is no one single or univocal deconstruction, but only specific and irreducible instances in which deconstruction takes place. Unlike a method, which is able to be generalized in advance of its particular applications, deconstruction comprises a highly specific form of involvement that is context dependent and particular. It is for this reason that deconstruction (which, if we are really strict about things, should probably be written in the plural) cannot be “reduced to some methodological instrumentality or to a set of rules and transposable procedures.”26
“deconstruction is not an all-purpose tool that deconstructs every system in the same way, like a recipe for cooking all fish, flesh, or fowl identically.”28
For these reasons, deconstruction is a kind of anti- or non-method. As Derrida explains, “It does not settle for methodical procedures, it opens up a passageway, it marches ahead and marks a trail.”29 Deconstruction, then, is less a method and more of what the Brazilian philosopher of communication Ciro Marcondes Filho has called “metáporo.” According to Marcondes Filho, a method is, “by definition, a pre-mapped path that the researcher needs to follow.” It is, therefore, generally “fixed, rigid, and immutable.” By contrast, metáporo is more flexible and responsive to the particular: “If on the contrary, one opts for a procedure that follows its object and accompanies it in its unfolding, this opens a way, a ‘poros’ or a furrow, like a boat that cuts through the water without creating tracks. With metáporo, the object follows its own way and we accompany it without previous script, without a predetermined route, living in what happens while pursing the investigation.”30 Deconstruction, then, is not a tool or instrument of investigation that is selected, taken up, and utilized by a (human) subject and applied to an object of knowledge. One does not, for instance, wake up in the morning, go to the office, and get to work deconstructing some object or another. Rather, the object of deconstruction is always and already in deconstruction such that the task of the human subject is to accompany or follow its particular unfoldings. The subject, therefore, is subject(ed) to the object(ive) of deconstruction.
As Johnson explains in an essay titled “Nothing Fails Like Success”: “As soon as any radically innovative thought becomes an ism, its specific ground breaking force diminishes, its historical notoriety increases, and its disciples tend to become more simplistic, more dogmatic, and ultimately more conservative, at which time its power becomes institutional rather than analytical.”43 Such was the fate of deconstruction in America.44
“It is impossible,” as Jean Baudrillard explains, “to destroy the system by a contradiction-based logic or by reversing the balance of forces—in short, by a direct, dialectical revolution affecting the economic or political infrastructure. Everything that produces contradiction or a balance of forces or energy in general merely feeds back into the system and drives it on.”9 When it comes to binary oppositions, resistance appears to be futile. Any form of opposition or critical pushback would already and immediately become reabsorbed into the very system that one would be seeking to oppose and work against. For this reason, it remains persistently difficult to say anything against, to disrupt, or even question the hegemony of binary opposition without already participating in and utilizing the very terminology and logic that were to be submitted to scrutiny in the first place.
The dictionary provides what is perhaps the best illustration of this basic semiotic principle. As Jay David Bolter explains: “We can only define a sign in terms of other signs of the same nature. This lesson is known to every child who discovers that fundamental paradox of the dictionary: that if you do not know what some words mean you can never use the dictionary to learn what other words mean. The definition of any word, if pursued far enough through the dictionary, will lead you in circles.”12 Signs, therefore, do not refer to things that exist outside the system of signs; signs refer to other signs.
If structuralism is right (or at least accurate on this point), then binary opposition does not just describe the technical operations of the digital computer but also characterizes the fundamental structure of language and human cognition, meaning that it is not possible to conceptualize or to say anything about binary opposition without utilizing and participating in the system or logical order it organizes. This is one aspect of the meaning that is conveyed by what remains one of the most famous (or notorious) statements from Derrida: “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte” or “There is nothing outside the text.”13
It is not possible to conceptualize or to say anything about binary opposition without utilizing and participating in the system or logical order it organizes.
Consequently, binary oppositions are not just a matter of discursive difference; they are the site of real social, political, and moral power. Whoever or whatever controls the terms of a debate controls the debate. Consider, for instance, how the abortion question has been structured in political discourse, especially in the United States. Each side in the dispute struggles to gain the upper hand by arranging a conceptual opposition in an attempt to govern how one thinks and speaks about this subject matter. One side designates itself “pro-life” in an effort to characterize its opponents as “anti-life.” The other side calls itself “pro-choice” in order to define its adversary—the pro-life faction—as opponents of free choice, specifically a woman’s right to choose. The political and moral debate about abortion, therefore (at least as it has transpired in the United States), is a struggle between two different sets of binary oppositions, each of which tries to get the upper hand in the conversation by controlling the very terms by which one thinks and speaks about abortion.
Binary oppositions are not just a matter of discursive difference; they are the site of real social, political, and moral power. Binary oppositions, then, are neither neutral nor objective. They have real and potentially devastating consequences. As Donna Haraway argues, “certain dualisms have been persistent in Western traditions; they have been systemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of color, nature, workers, animals—in short, domination of all constituted as others, whose task it is to mirror the self. Chief among these troubling dualisms are self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource, maker/made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/partial, God/man.”19
As Audre Lorde accurately formulated the problem: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”21 But what other tools are there? How is it possible to say anything at all about that which ruptures and exceeds the limits of available words and concepts without (re)using those very words and concepts?
overturning and displacement
Deconstruction takes place and has its place as a kind of post-Hegelian thinking that aims to achieve escape velocity from the gravitational pull of Hegelian dialectics. I write “post” instead of “anti” (which is the term associated with other poststructuralists, such as Gilles Deleuze) because direct opposition to Hegel as the means of escaping the legacy and logic of Hegelianism is easier said than done. And it is one of Derrida’s poststructuralist precursors, Michel Foucault, who provided what is quite possibly the most accurate articulation of the problem: “But to truly escape Hegel involves an exact appreciation of the price we have to pay to detach ourselves from him. . . . We have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands motionless, waiting for us.”45
Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia famously postulates something called the “experience machine”—a computer-controlled system with electrodes that directly stimulate the user’s central nervous system. “Suppose,” Nozick writes, “there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Super-duper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain.”25 Given this set-up, Nozick then asks whether one would make the decision to plug into this machine for life. In response, he argues that most people, if given such an opportunity, would not: “Plugging into an experience machine limits us to a man-made reality, to a world no deeper or more important than that which people can construct. There is no actual contact with any deeper reality, though the experience can be simulated.”26 Like the decision documented in Plato’s Republic, Nozick affirms the value of true experiences in the real world over illusory and artificial deceptions, no matter how enjoyable or entertaining the latter might appear to be.
Virtual is not situated as the opposite of the real, but comprises something that exceeds the grasp of the conceptual differences situated between the real and its logical opposites.
“By the late twentieth century,” Haraway explains, “we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short we are cyborgs.”47 This cyborg assimilation, however, has little or nothing to do with technical augmentation or even metaphoric forms of technological dependency. Instead, “cyborg” names the product of a dual boundary breakdown in existing ontological categories: 1) that between animals (or other organisms) and humans, and 2) that between self-controlled, self-governing machines and organisms, especially humans. And these boundary breakdowns are, as Haraway illustrates, particularly evident in contemporary culture:
By the late twentieth century in United States, scientific culture, the boundary between human and animal is thoroughly breached. The last beachheads of uniqueness have been polluted, if not turned into amusement parks—language, tool use, social behavior, mental events. Nothing really convincingly settles the separation of human and animal. . . . Late twentieth century machines have made thoroughly ambiguous the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed, and many other distinctions that used to apply to organisms and machines. Our machines are disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert.48
The cyborg, then, is neither the dystopian figure of dehumanization popularized in science fiction nor the utopian promise for human improvement and perfection that has been promoted in transhumanism. Instead, it comprises a posthuman figure resulting from the deconstruction of the human. This effort is not a mere theoretical exercise for ivory-tower navel contemplation; it has very real and practical consequences. Despite what one might initially think, the term “human” is not some eternal, universal, and immutable Platonic idea. In fact, who is and who is not human is something that has been open to ideological negotiations and social pressures. At different times, membership criteria for inclusion in club have been defined in such a way as to not only marginalize but also justify the exclusion of others—barbarians, women, Jews, people of color, indigenous communities, and so on. This “sliding scale of humanity”49 institutes a metaphysical concept of the human that is inconsistent, incoherent, and capricious. It is precisely for this reason that Haraway introduces the cyborg as a blasphemous and monstrous figure that can intervene in and even avoid contributing to the logic and legacy of these violent forms of exclusion, marginalization, and domination. “Perhaps,” as Haraway recommends, “we can learn from our fusion with animals and machines how not to be Man, the embodiment of Western Logos.”50
The cyborg is neither opposed to nor an elaboration of the human but provides a way to think outside the box of the phallogocentric tradition of humanism.
Understood in this fashion, the cyborg is neither opposed to nor an elaboration of the human but provides a way to think outside the box of the phallogocentric tradition of humanism, which is not some naturally occurring objective idea but an ideology that promotes and protects certain interests and investments. Consequently, this posthuman subject, as N. Katherine Hayles accurately characterizes it, “does not really mean the end of humanity. It signals instead the end of a certain conception of the human, a conception that may have applied, at best, to that fraction of humanity who had the wealth, power, and leisure to conceptualize themselves as autonomous beings exercising their will through individual agency and choice.”51
But why? Why bother with this effort? What does it do for us? The value of all of this is that deconstruction, although informed and made possible by an engagement with the past, provides a way forward into possible futures that are not merely beholden to a repetition of what has gone before. The raison d’être of deconstruction, then, is that it opens up the opportunity and possibility to think, to speak, and to act otherwise. In other words, it provides a way to identify, to think about, and to say something that is different and to do so in a way that can make a difference. But again, the skeptical reader might ask (and should ask): Why? Why mess with the status quo, when it seems to work just fine? Or to put it more directly: If it ain’t broke, why bother trying to fix it?
Deconstruction is site specific. As Derrida explains: “There is no one deconstruction. There are only singular movements, more or less idiomatic styles, strategies, effects of deconstruction that are heterogeneous from one place to another, from one (historical, national, cultural, linguistic, even ‘individual’) situation to another. This heterogeneity is irreducible and taking account of it is essential to every deconstruction.”5
Deconstruction provides a potent mechanism for thinking our way out of the maze of troubling oppositional pairs by which we have made sense of ourselves, our world, and others.
Does this mean, then, that deconstruction is essentially Eurocentric? The answer to this question has to be (and this should, by now, be no surprise) both yes and no, because what deconstruction targets and works to deconstruct is Eurocentrism. Derrida’s efforts to intervene in the phallogocentric tradition that has been the defining condition and focal point of European thought is something that takes place and has its place within the confines of these boundaries. It therefore involves what Derrida has characterized as a parasitic activity, what Spivak describes as “critical intimacy” where one “speaks from inside,” or what Haraway calls blasphemy—a deliberate and calculated response that understands, acknowledges, and continually works within the margins of an established system.6 It is by occupying the space of the existing logocentric system and drawing on its language, logic, and conceptual resources that one is able to challenge its hegemony and open it up to alternative configurations, eccentricities, and ways of thinking, speaking, and acting otherwise. And Derrida, for his part, was acutely aware of this, carefully documenting the exigencies of this rather delicate procedure. In fact, the fact that Derrida, on the one hand, has been scathingly criticized for being a philosophical anarchist dead set on “destroying the Western tradition” and, on the other hand, has been taken up and celebrated by a generation of postcolonial and feminist scholars, writers, and activists demonstrates the importance and impact of these efforts to deconstruct Eurocentrism.
“To his critics, Mr. Derrida appeared to be a pernicious nihilist who threatened the very foundation of Western society and culture. By insisting that truth and absolute value cannot be known with certainty, his detractors argue, he undercut the very possibility of moral judgment. To follow Mr. Derrida, they maintain, is to start down the slippery slope of skepticism and relativism that inevitably leaves us powerless to act responsibly.”11 And this sort of critical dismissal has, once again, been asserted in direct opposition to statements by Derrida that explicitly assert the exact opposite: “From the standpoint of semantics, but also of ethics and politics, ‘deconstruction’ should never lead either to relativism or to any sort of indeterminism.”12
“‘There is nothing outside the text.’ That does not mean that all referents are suspended, denied, or enclosed in a book, as people have claimed, or have been naïve enough to believe and to have accused me of believing. But it does mean that every referent, all reality has the structure of a differential trace, and that one cannot refer to this ‘real’ except in an interpretive experience.”
If binary opposition (or, if one prefers, the principle of noncontradiction) is not optional but part and parcel of the languages we speak, then any effort to intervene in and disrupt the functioning of this conceptual order necessarily confronts the structural limits of language and the possibility of clear and effective communication.
As soon as we open our mouths to try to identify this third alternative, as soon as we say something like “It is . . .” or “It is called . . . ,” we have fallen back into the system of logical oppositions and terminology that we had sought to challenge in the first place. It is, therefore, not possible to say anything about deconstruction without using the very resources of that which is to be deconstructed.
It is, therefore, not possible to say anything about deconstruction without using the very resources of that which is to be deconstructed.
For Derrida, the visibly differentiated différance designates a different way to think and write of a difference that remains in excess of the Hegelian concept of difference, which was exclusively understood as negation and contradiction. Différance, to say it differently, is a way to think and describe another modality of difference that is not beholden to or limited by the principle of noncontradiction.
Consequently, deconstruction, whether employing the strategy of neologism, paleonymy, or some hybrid mixture of the two, always and necessarily runs the risk of having its interventions reappropriated into the field of conceptual oppositions in which and on which they have been designed to work. This exposure to misunderstanding and domestication is not the result of an individual critic who has it in for deconstruction, even if critics have often exploited this situation for their own purposes. Instead, it is a systemic necessity and unavoidable byproduct of logic and language. If the logical exigency of binary opposition is not optional and resistance to it is effectively futile, then any alternative, no matter how well articulated and contextualized, is immediately and unavoidably exposed to the risk of reappropriation. “The hierarchy of dual oppositions,” as Derrida concludes, “always reestablishes itself.”24
Because deconstruction is always and necessarily exposed to the risk of reappropriation, the work of deconstruction is never complete or able to be finished. It is and must be what Derrida calls “an interminable analysis,”25 a never-ending engagement that must continually submit its own innovations, movements, and conclusions to further scrutiny. For this reason, deconstruction does not and cannot conform to traditional models of knowledge production and representation. Its investigations do not and cannot supply anything like a definitive answer or conclusive solution, in the usual sense of the words. Instead its different queries, no matter what angle or aspect is pursued, entail an endless reproduction of questioning that becomes increasingly involved with the complexity of its own problematic. Although this is something that clearly cuts against the grain of common sense, it is necessary if the projects of deconstruction are to be at all successful, consistent, and rigorously applied. This conclusion has a number of consequences, which are (not surprisingly) somewhat inconclusive.
“I am,” Daniel Dennett explains, “a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers. I haven’t begun by insulting myself and my discipline, in spite of first appearances. Finding better questions to ask, and breaking old habits and traditions of asking, is a very difficult part of the grand human project of understanding ourselves and our world.”33 Slavoj Žižek provides something similar: “There are not only true or false solutions, there are also false questions. The task of philosophy is not to provide answers or solutions, but to submit to critical analysis the questions themselves, to make us see how the very way we perceive a problem is an obstacle to its solution.”34 Consistent with this effort, deconstruction does not seek to provide definitive answers or solutions to existing problems. It seeks to demonstrate how the very way we conceive of and talk about a problem is already a problem and a potential obstacle to developing a solution.
In the final analysis we can say that deconstruction is neither a form of critical analysis nor does it seek out, achieve, or have any pretensions to finality. It is and can only take place as an endlessly open form of engagement with existing systems of thought in an effort to challenge the status quo and provide potent opportunities to think, speak, and act otherwise. This does not mean, however, that deconstruction is a form of textual free play where anything goes and all things are permitted. Quite the contrary. It proceeds by and necessitates excessive attention to the exigencies of language and logic in order to follow and apprehend every nuance of their intricate operations, procedures, and protocols. And it does so not to repeat what has gone before—even if, at times, it comes close to repetition—but to extract from such effort a difference that opens onto alternative opportunities and challenges that can make a difference.
None of the art/writing on this site was generated by LLMs.
If you'd like to get in touch with me, check out my about page.
Follow me with an RSS reader to be notified when I write something.