By Virgil B. Vallecera
I. INTRODUCTION
Some words are their own worst enemies. “Deconstruction” is one of them. Its meaning is often so vague as to be useless. Coined, more or less, by the contemporary French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, the word “deconstruction” began its life in the late sixties, but it has only become part of the American vocabulary in the last ten years or so. In that time, however, it has moved from a technical philosophical term mostly adopted by literary critics to a popular lingo in different endeavors. Whatever its original meaning, in its now widespread use, “deconstruction” has come to mean "tear down" or "destroy" (usually when the object is nonmaterial, like the way this introduction is written further).
A week ago, I worked over it repeatedly. Until a week after, I am now satisfied that I am done. But what does “done” mean? Doesn't it mean "I’ve said everything I want to say"? And what do I want it “to say”? Everything. Everything, that is, about Derrida’s Deconstruction. Of course, there will be minor points that I may ignore or safely overlook, but as long as something significant remains to be said about my topic or as long as the connections of important points have not been made clear, I think I am not done. When I say “I am done”, therefore, I have produced something that claims to say everything about Deconstruction. And the last thing to do is to submit this to my PolSci 10A instructor.
Halfway a week ago, when I claimed I’ve read and said everything about my topic and felt that I’m done and that the last thing to do is to submit this to my teacher, I wondered: “What is the first thing I will do so I can proceed do the last thing?” I pondered and concluded: “I'll write this introduction!” But if the introduction can say what the whole project says, then what need is there for the project? If they can't, then what need is there for the introduction? I know that sometimes they are appetizers (like now), things designed to get people to read this project (or at least to grade it according to the format). Most of the time, however, an introduction is a short version of a project, an overview. It sets the problem in context, it shows the readers how important the problem or solution is, it gives the argument in a more easily understood form.
This introduction says "one more thing" or "the same thing briefly," deconstructing the project's claim to be complete, to be done. In deconstructing the project, the introduction doesn't show the irrelevance of this project. It doesn't show that this project is meaningless. It shows that this project claims more than it can deliver, that it has left something out though it claims to be complete. I take that to be the general meaning of the word “Deconstruction” as Derrida has used it—not just using words and concepts against themselves, but showing what has been left out or overlooked. In fact, better: showing that something has been left out or overlooked, that omission is structural to any text—and that one can find those omissions in the structure of the text—without necessarily being able to specify what has been omitted.
II. BACKGROUND OF THE PHILOSOPHY
A. Historical Implication
Derrida takes the word “deconstruction” from the work of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger says the method of doing philosophy includes three steps—reduction, construction, and destruction—and he explains that these three are mutually pertinent to one another. Construction necessarily involves destruction, he says, and then he identifies destruction with deconstruction or in his words “Abbau”. Heidegger explains what he means by philosophical destruction by using an ordinary German word that translates literally as "unbuild."
He explains what he means by “Abbau”—deconstruction—to clarify further that he does not simply mean "taking things apart." As Heidegger conceived deconstruction, it was an answer to a philosophical problem: There is a world "out there." Our problem is that our only rational access to that world is linguistic, which might make us mistakenly to believe that our understanding of the world is always product of our language. If we add our suspicion to Heidegger's point that we have inherited our concepts and words from others who themselves had to work with inherited concepts and words and we quickly come to a question: How, then, can we think about the world productively? How can we avoid reducing understanding to something related only to a particular language and history? If we must use concepts we've inherited from others to do philosophy (or this project), how can we ever get to anything new? How can we get beyond whatever mistakes our intellectual ancestors may have made? Aren't we condemned to repeat the same mistakes?
We might, for example, think about Aristotle's discussion of form and matter (my most favorite philosophy to discuss), using those very terms to show their shortfall. What, after all, is matter? Any answer I give is in terms of another form rather than in terms of matter. Or how about: "What is this project made of; what is its material?" Answer: "Paper." But the word “paper” gives us a form, not a matter. I can ask, "What is the paper made of?" and give a reasonable answer, though one still in terms of form. As we use the terms “matter” and “form” against themselves, what starts out like a perfectly sensible question becomes problematic. By making a problem with the distinction, we begin to get at least a glimpse of the problem to which Aristotle was responding. Perhaps we begin to wonder—to think, to remember—in the same way that he did. If we do, perhaps we begin to do philosophy about Aristotle's questions rather than simply to repeat the scholarly explanation of Aristotle's philosophy.
Derrida would say of this example that we can deconstruct the idea of form and matter. But what he means by “deconstruction” differs from what Heidegger means. For one thing deconstruction is an attitude, in the root sense of that word. It is a method of how to read texts.
B. Life of the Philosopher
Derrida (1930-2004) was born in
Derrida’s work focused more on language. He contended that the traditional or metaphysical way of reading makes a number of false assumptions about the nature of texts. A traditional reader believes that language is capable of expressing ideas without changing them, that in the hierarchy of language writing is secondary to speech, and that the author of a text is the source of its meaning. Derrida's deconstructive style of reading subverted these assumptions and challenged the idea that a text has an unchanging, unified meaning, which he calls “Univocity”.
Drawing on psychoanalysis and linguistics, Derrida questioned this traditional approach to texts and the assumption that speech is a clear and direct method of communication. As a result, he insisted, the author’s intentions in speaking cannot be unconditionally accepted. Derrida’s approach multiplied the number of legitimate interpretations of a text.
Deconstruction shows the multiple layers of meaning at work in language. By deconstructing the works of previous scholars, Derrida attempted to show that language is constantly shifting. Deconstruction can be better understood as showing the unavoidable tensions between the ideals of clarity and coherence that govern philosophy and the inevitable shortcomings that accompany its production, which then leads to possibilities of omission.
III. THEORY
Notice, in my introduction, by means of deconstruction, the reader has seen something that was omitted (an obvious fact on how it seemed to introduce Deconstruction without even establishing its definition in a brief way). Sorry, the reader won't be able to go back, insert the missing piece, and then be finally done. The omission is structural to writing and explaining. Omission is unavoidable. For one thing, no one can say everything about anything. Besides, things are never that simple for me.
This inability to say everything is not a failure of language. It is one of the properties of things. If I hold this project up before my PolSci 10A instructor and ask her to tell me what she sees, she can give a list of the thing's properties. If she works at it, she can make that list very long. It may become ever more difficult to add things to the list, but there is really no end to what she could truthfully say about this project. She can, for example, always relate it to another thing in the universe or even to the list she is making.
In principle, there is no end to the length of the description one can give of an ordinary object. As a result, it is impossible to say everything about an object, material or otherwise.
Moreover, the object itself shows that there is still more to be said. Every object shows itself as a set of possibilities, not merely as a determinate thing. To see a particular object is to see it in terms of possibilities. It is for example, to see the possibility of seeing the object from another perspective without knowing what perspective that might be or what I might see from that other perspective. To perceive an object is to know immediately that there is always more to be said. All experience is experience of more, of possibility; hence, the possibilities are endless!
Aside from a philosophical perspective, Deconstruction can be seen as a literary style of criticism. As part of subverting the presumed dominance of speech (or describing this project) over text, Derrida argued that the idea of a speech-writing dichotomy contains within it the idea of a very expansive view of texts that include both speech and writing. According to Derrida, "There is nothing outside of the text". That is, text is thought of not merely as linear writing derived from speech, but any form of depiction, marking, or storage, including the marking of the human brain by the process of cognition or by the senses.
In a sense, deconstruction is simply a way to read text (as broadly defined); any deconstruction has text as its object and subject. That is why, Deconstruction has been applied to literature, art, architecture, science, mathematics, philosophy, and psychology, and any other disciplines that can be thought of as involving the act of marking or inking.
In deconstruction, text can be thought of as "dead", in the sense that once the markings are made, the markings remain in suspended animation and do not change in themselves. Thus, what I say about Derrida’s text doesn't revive Deconstruction per se, since it is just another text commenting on the original, along with the commentary of others. In this view, when I say, "You have understood my work perfectly," this utterance constitutes an addition to the texts, along with what the reader said was understood in and about the original text. The reader has an opinion, the author has an opinion. Communication is possible not because the text has a “transcendental signified” (as what Derrida calls it), but because my brain tissue contains similar "markings" as the brain tissue of the reader. These brain markings, however, are unstable and fragmentary.
IV. POSTMODERN ISSUE
In popular media, deconstruction has been seized upon by conservative writers as a central example of what is wrong with modern academia. Editorials and columns come out with some frequency pointing to deconstruction as a sign of how absurd English departments have become, and of how traditional values are no longer being taught to students. Conservatives frequently treat deconstruction as being equivalent to Marxism.
Deconstruction is also used by many popular sources as a synonym for “revisionism”—for instance, the book by Renato Contantino, “Veneration Without Understanding” was presented as a "deconstruction" of Jose Rizal’s popular yet treacherous actions.
In popular parlance, 'to deconstruct' is often perceived with the sense of dismantling the opinions, legitimacy, or value of other groups or individuals; by 'deconstructing' Jose Rizal, Constantino lays bare Rizal’s inferiority or his subconscious or ill motives.
More so, the term is used in pop-culture criticism or “revisionism” to refer to a story which presents a well-known concept or plot in a way, which intentionally reverses or subverts the common elements of the original, with the intention of laying bare the underlying assumptions in it. This can be done either as a criticism or parody of the original. For example, Constantino’s deconstruction of the popular perception of Rizal as being all-know-how yet by tearing down every bit of correspondences Rizal made, the Constantino was able to present a new object of criticism: That Rizal was a big no-no. This use of the term, which is only incidentally connected to Derrida's original, seems to be taking hold among various people in recent years.
V. ANALYSIS / SOLUTIONS
Deconstructive criticism is not intended to suggest a way to make something like this project or someone like Rizal finally be done or be complete, but to show its necessary incompleteness. Again, deconstruction does not assume that once its work has been done everything will have been included. In sum, deconstruction doesn't assume that there is, even if only in principle, an end to the work of deconstruction. The point of deconstruction is to show where something has been omitted, not because of the blindness of the author, not because the reader or my PolSci 10A instructor is smarter or better, but because that is the way things is. There are always things I don't know, though in a very real way that “I don't know them” is part of what “I know.”
The common assumption of deconstruction is that language necessarily "fails" to say everything, to remember everything, but it nevertheless says something, even something about what it fails to recover, to remember.
The point of deconstruction is to help us remember what the text calls us to remember but then forgets by its very nature. It may not be possible simply to remember what we have forgotten, but deconstruction calls us at least to remember our forgetting.
Language will never capture what it aims at completely because the things, whether words, material objects, persons, human relations, Rizal, or God, cannot be captured fully—and that is because to think that something could be captured fully is to think of it as static, as without possibility, as dead in the strictest sense.
In fact, though I am not a Derridean fan, I think that with such things in mind, Derrida's work changes its character, moving from playful, irritating, but nonsensical texts to playful, irritating, demanding, and sometimes profound texts. Derrida sees writing as an aid to memory: Its purpose is to help us remember what is always nevertheless forgotten. As texts of memory, Derrida's works move from a position as texts on the margins of literary criticism and philosophical interests to texts that run about this project’s format, about what we have forgotten and, perhaps to this project’s peril, ignored.
In other words, text can only be done when one would extend criticism on what is not present in it, on what is forgotten.
For now, I will submit this project to my PolSci10A instructor and ask for her comments. And I think I am done then on.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
J. Derrida, “On Grammatology” (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1976)
J. Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy” (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1981)
J. Cudden, “A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory” (London: Blackwell, 1991)
R. Rorty, “The
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