Deconstruction, stability and tradition
by Robert Philbin
[ opinion - august 10 ]
'I was very disappointed at the use of the word "deconstruction". I felt it was an exploitation of the term. At the end, a graduate student uses the word as a stereotype, to destroy it, to undermine it, to vulgarize it.'
(Jacque Derrida, 'Philosopher Gamely in Defense of His Ideas', New York Times, 30 May 1998).
Deconstruction is an invaluable anarchistic methodology of inquisition, a strategy which opens up the possibility for discovery of the most expansive "fields of meaning" hidden in any text. The point of entry into what some call the "circle of discourse" with literature is usually by way of one of three basic critical perspectives: the individual inquiry (author and reader), the social (the cultural, political, economic, historic), and the psychoanalytical inquiry (the mythic, irrational, unconscious etc.). Each of these approaches implies a much wider exploration of the given perspective as indeed has occurred ad infinitum in philosophy and literature and film criticism over the last century.
The critique of the individual, the authorial, for example, inevitably meanders to the doorstep of the cognitive sciences, engaging with linguistics and morphing eventually into ethics. The social critique, a favorite of the left in opposition to the formalism of the New Critics, moves directly through the socio-anthropological to political structures, premised on economic strategies which imply theories of innate "social justice," "capitalism," "communism," and so forth, as manipulated by ruling elites into the guise of "culture." The psychoanalytical approach ultimately doubles back again to the cognitive sciences in pursuit of the "unconscious" or subliminal as a natural state residing in the mental apparatus of the species just as it lurks behind the everyday reality we confront existentially.
So these methods of critique, and their dozen or so emergent schools of discourse, provide ambitious rhetorical tools with which we might dedicatedly chisel away at a work arriving finally at some "meaningful understanding" contained in a given text. Well how does this intentionally naive approach to Deconstruction compare with the powerful strategies of "Deconstructivism" in the pioneering work of philosopher Jaques Derrida? Actually it both does and doesn't relate to Derrida, based primarily on the degree of application, and the ability of the text itself to withstand deconstructionist critique.
In the first instance, the strategy of deconstruction as one of "disassembly" or the parsing of embedded textual elements to arrive at discovering essential definitions and contradictions buried there, seems perfectly obvious. A building or built structure, for example, can be deconstructed (collapsed) by acts of war, by legal condemnation and removal, or by the gradual reclamation of nature (environment) over time. A structure can also be deconstructed architecturally, that is, element by element, a process which in fact systematically "preserves" each element for future assembly, study, or recycled use.
The difference in methodology results from the objective or purpose of the "deconstruction" and the stability and relative "value" contained within the structure itself. The objective of the deconstruction is irrelevant to the building, and its relative "stability" is self-contained and inherent in its current state as a "built thing," while a structure's "value" is imposed upon it by some external system of critique and valuation.
The more "controversial" aspects contained in Derridian strategies, which he attempted to mollify in later years, were instigated by reactionary influences in opposition to the "destabilization" of "meaning" when his critique pressured the stability of texts given "special" consideration as a part of some political, literary, or sacred cannon or "tradition." Deconstruction theoretically recognizes the "value" of any cannon or "tradition" only to the extend that the text exudes such "value" and this critical move opens the door to anarchy in the sense that all authoritative cannon - traditional, sacred, political and so on - become the legitimate object of deconstruction and critique:
[L]anguage bears within itself the necessity of its own critique. This critique may be undertaken along two tracks, in two "manners." Once the limit of nature/culture opposition makes itself felt, one might want to question systematically and rigorously the history of these concepts. This is a first action. Such a systematic and historic questioning would be neither a philological nor a philosophical action in the classic sense of these words. Concerning oneself with the founding concepts of the whole history of philosophy, de-constituting them, is not to undertake the task of the philologist or of the classic historian of philosophy. In spite of appearances, it is probably the most daring way of making the beginnings of a step outside of philosophy. The step "outside philosophy" is much more difficult to conceive than is generally imagined by those who think they made it long ago with cavalier ease, and who are in general swallowed up in metaphysics by the whole body of the discourse that they claim to have disengaged from it. [Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference.]
From this point of critique, Platonic texts, for example, lose meaning at some distance from their specific historic context because - one example - Plato reasoned pre-Darwin, and incorrectly, from the "ideation" to the "material." But all thought (ideation) is generated in the human brain which is the material product of biological evolution. A random example of instability in a Platonic text is this moribund attempt to arrive at an argument for relative "justice":
For all the wrongs they had ever done to anyone and all whom they had severally wronged they had paid the penalty in turn tenfold for each, and the measure of this was by periods of a hundred years each, so that on the assumption that this was the length of human life the punishment might be ten times the crime-as for example that if anyone had been the cause of many deaths or had betrayed cities and armies and reduced them to slavery, or had been participant in any other iniquity, they might receive in requital pains tenfold for each of these wrongs, and again if any had done deeds of kindness and been just and holy men they might receive their due reward in the same measure. [Republic, Book 10 614b-616a, p838]
This arcane discourse is so loaded with historic and philosophical antiquity that one "daring" step "outside of philosophy" (that is, the traditional study of Plato) voids the text. Meanwhile, Aristotle, by contrast, appears more contemporaneously "stable" precisely because he accepts a certain material fluidity and "process," which instantly implies an innate "instability" within any "system" whether biological, material, poetic, and so on:
A potentiality is either the passive capacity of a substance to be changed or (in the case of animate beings) its active capacity to produce change in other substances in determinate ways. An actuality is just the realization of one of these potentialities, which is most significant when it includes not merely the movement but also its purpose. Becoming, then, is the process in which the potentiality present in one individual substance is actualized through the agency of something else which is already actual.
[Metaphysics IX]
This locates Aristotle, at least momentarily, within the Derridian camp; but why assume deconstruction, as a method of inquiry, is obligated to pressure every text to a stress point of destabilization and collapse? As with architecture, some texts are innately unstable in terms of post-modern critique because they contain innate history-bound constructions. Indeed the location of such stress points of failure, fissures of irrelevancy, and so on, is one objective of methodical inquiry into discovering "the meaningful."
This is how we arrive at the concurrent state of instability as pushing against the relatively "meaningful" in any text. Deconstruction clarifies this dynamic of relative textural stability against instability, which is part of larger dialectics constantly "processing" history through time. So every text contains both its innate relative "meaning" (stability) and simultaneously an approaching state of "meaninglessness" (instability), all of which is ripe for inquiry at any moment of discourse in history.
The dynamic of the "meaningful" and "meaningless" is encapsulated and encoded in language constructed in the text as it moves through time, so interpretation becomes "temporary," in this sense, to a particular historic context. Therefore "meaning" can be defined, in part, by that which remains when the "no longer meaningful" has been parsed to the surface and brought "outside" the text. Texts which deconstruct under critical inquiry can be said to be innately "unstable" and therefore "meaning" can continuously be deconstructed and critiqued accordingly. This is what it means to be a "critical reader" in the ongoing "circle of discourse" (or confrontation) between reader and text.
Both Plato and Aristotle accepted slave labor, for example, as legitimate to the social accrual of private wealth in maintenance of a specific political and economic status quo. This factoid alone renders their social discourse suspect as "unstable" to post modern critique. Even if historically insightful to contemporary politics, culture, economics, etc., the text remains "suspect," a line between "knowledge" and "meaningful" drawn. But Derridian inquiry didn't destabilized these texts, or their relative value to or within some "tradition." Each text rather carried its own unique destabilizing mutation through time, waiting to be discovered at this very historic moment.
