Deconstruction is, roughly speaking (and believe, me, I'm speaking schematically here) for the purposes of this discussion, the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, and his followers. (We'll ignore, for the moment, the more literary analysis of Paul De Man, which often go under the name of deconstruction as well.)

Derrida makes it very clear throughout his writings that deconstruction is not a repeatable method which can be applied to a text, but rather, an engagement with a text on its own terms. So, there is no "formula" or set of steps that can be applied.

Second, despite the author's reduction of deconstruction to a branch of literary criticism, the texts in question are more often from the philosophical corpus than from the literary tradition. While it's true that Derrida devotes more attention to folks like Joyce, Celan and Genet than most philosophers do, the quantity of pages he devotes to them is a tiny fragment of the time he devotes to Heidegger, Husserl and Hegel, for instance.

Despite the author's step-by-step breakdown, deconstruction in practice doesn't work this way. If I were forced to generalize (and I suppose I am), I would say that deconstruction consists most often of a micrological reading (that is to say, a very close reading of the actual words of the text, not not just the broad concepts) which takes into account the (usually unconscious) assumptions that the author is working within. Most often, these assumptions, when taken to their logical conclusion lead to either a contradiction or an aporia, and the text often reflects this, unknowingly. So, a deconstructive reading often picks up on latent implications of the text itself.

I should point out that the author here is completely wrong when he writes "Step 2 -- Decide what the text says. This can be whatever you want...." This is egregiously incorrect. In fact, one of Derrida's main points is that we do not decide at all what the text says. (As an aside, decidability is actually a term of art within deconstruction, so the author's abuse of it here is particularly irksome. If he had say "figure out" instead of "decide" he'd have been less wrong on several counts.)

To take a concrete (and much celebrated) example, Derrida's "Plato's Pharmacy" is a reading of Plato's Phaedrus. It will make absolutely no sense to you if you haven't already read the Phaedrus closely, and are already familiar with the traditional interpretation of the text within philosophical circles. Sorry, but that's the bar to entry.

Assuming that you know the Phaedrus, then: the central moment in the text (according to the standard reading) is the condemnation of writing-- you know the passage. In the course of this, Plato (or rather Socrates, or rather, an Egyptian king in a legend recounted by Socrates recounted by Plato) compares writing to a drug, using the Greek word "pharmakon". Derrida shows that this word, like the English word "drug", has both a positive sense ("remedy") and a negative sense ("poison"), and cannot be reduced to either singular meaning. Furthermore, the oscillation between these two meanings cannot be fully controlled, but only understood through context, which is never saturated (never fully complete.) Put simply, if you call something a drug, you can't exclude either the positive or negative meaning in the mind of the listener. Now, at this point, Derrida then goes through the entire Platonic corpus, and quotes every time the word "pharmakon" or one of its cognates ("pharmikia", etc.) is mentioned, and shows the range of meanings implied by this term for Plato, and its implications for the passage in the Phaedrus. So far, so good. But here comes the kicker: Derrida shows that although Plato uses a variety of related terms throughout his works, there is one cognate which is notable by its absence: "pharmakos", meaning "scapegoat". And this ghost-reference to scapegoating seems to fit quite well with what Plato is doing with writing.

Now, I've trivialized Derrida's argument in at least a dozen ways in writing this-- and as I said, the above will not make any sense if you're not already steeped in the debates within the philosophical tradition about "writing" versus "speech", which are of little interest to anybody outside of the philosophical tradition. But that's a taste of what deconstruction is like, and how it operates.

I'll note in passing that there is only one "binary opposition" that Derrida is at all interested in within his work-- "interior" vs "exterior"-- and the "speech" vs "writing" discussion in Plato is a proxy for this.

The paper linked here make "jive with what your eyes see", because it was written by somebody on the outside, looking in. And I'm sure that if I were to write an outsider's view of a discipline I knew nothing about (say, astro-physics) it might look completely plausible to another outsider, while in reality bearing little resemblance to what actually goes on within the discipline.

Does that help at all?

To me at least, it sounds like perhaps what you are talking about is legitimate, sincere deconstruction, whereas the author is talking (correctly, in my opinion) about an "evil twin" so to speak (ie: conservatives --> neo-conservatives).

>If he had say "figure out" instead of "decide"...

I think that statement illustrates the disconnect...."figuring out" is what should be done, but "deciding" is what is often actually done. To me it seems you are talking about the uncompromised (correctly implemented) theory, whereas he is talking about what the theory has typically become, in actual practice. If that makes any sense.

Perhaps I am; where does this evil twin reside?

I am speaking of the work of Derrida, and the work of his followers that is (for the sake of simplicity) published by university presses-- because that's what I read.

If the "evil twins" are undergrad posers, well, I don't really know or care what they're up to these days.

I think that statement illustrates the disconnect...."figuring out" is what should be done, but "deciding" is what is often actually done. To me it seems you are talking about the uncompromised (correctly implemented) theory, whereas he is talking about what the theory has typically become, in actual practice. If that makes any sense.

It makes sense, but it's not what I was getting at.

My point was a Nietzschean one (which Derrida concurs with).

We don't consciously choose how to interpret a text.

Here's a link to an old Usenet post I wrote, which collects a few Derrida quotations, one of which is precisely on this subject:

http://groups.google.com/group/humanities.classics/browse_th...

(Sorry about the crappy formating there...)

About 70% of the humanities papers I've ever attempted to read had a much lower insight:word ratio than the newspaper. The humanities aren't fundamentally technical in the way physics is - they're always making subjective judgments, and everything's up for interpretation. So just say it, then, don't give me a bunch of stupid .25 cent word padding. I have a good vocabulary, I know those words, and I'm not impressed. If your idea can't be distilled to a simpler formulation than most of the crazy crap I saw in my friends' reading when I was an undergrad, you're probably not saying much of import.

PS your excellent summary above was a case of good writing. You could have made the same point using 4X as much words and a bunch of crazy but still-technically-grammatical-therefore-smart sentence structures, and that would have been the evil twin. Usually, when someone resorts to the silly-season writing, it's a good indicator that they don't actually have a point.

1. This is true

2. This works

3. This sounds true

4. This sounds neat

With all due respect, the example of Derrida's deconstruction that you give ("pharmakos" and all that) doesn't seem to rise above level 4.

I'm sorry that my one-paragraph summary of Derrida's reading of the Phaedrus was not up to your high standards. Perhaps you would like to offer a one-paragraph summary of some other reading of the Phaedrus that you think rises above level 4?

I think this is the main portion of the debate: all this talk is nonsense in any bigger picture.

I would like to point out then, that to this layman, "I would say that deconstruction consists most often of a micrological reading (that is to say, a very close reading of the actual words of the text, not not just the broad concepts) which takes into account the (usually unconscious) assumptions that the author is working within" sounds almost exactly like, "Decide what the text says. This can be whatever you want..." since we can't ever know what the unconscious assumptions are of an author.

It does, yes. Thanks for taking the time, that was really detailed and informative.

Continental Philosophy is a fascinating discipline, and I really don't understand why people who don't understand it feel the need to dismiss it via a caricature.

I didn't really expect the author's jokey explanation of deconstruction to be technically accurate, and I can understand why it would irritate people in the field.

I'd be more interested to hear what you think of his other arguments, and the comments quoted by Chomsky in this thread.

In particular charges of obscurantism, intellectually-vain tail-chasing, being 'epistemologically challenged', his metaphors of 'genetic drift' and 'peacock feathers' where academic communities evolve to fill the vacuum with linguistic puffery, jargon and self-referential bullshit in the absence of any clearly-stated objective or externally-imposed goals and success criteria.

Admittedly critical theory is far from the only academic discipline to be subject to these accusations. And maybe you'd argue that in this case the accusations aren't valid.

But, you'd have to admit that, by virtue of their epistemic outlook and the criterea they have available by which to assess research, some disciplines are inevitably going to be more susceptible to these phenomena than others, and hence need to work harder to combat them.

This may be how it looks to an outsider like Chomsky, but it's not an accurate description of the academic communities that he is not a party to.

"Jargon" is what an outsider calls another discipline's terms of art. "Generative grammar" is jargon to a ballet dancer. "Battement tendu" is jargon to a linguist.

I'm sorry if Chomsky expects philosophy to have a "clearly-stated objective" or "externally imposed goals and success criteria" beyond what they've had for the past couple millenia, but there you have it.

I'd say that it's possible, and worthwhile, to investigate and make some attempt at classifying jargons with respect to properties like:

* To what extent do layers of jargon correspond to layers of depth of ideas in the field which they describe * How precisely-defined are they, and how well-founded are the definitions * Are there clear externally-verifiable criteria which can be used to distinguish valid use from misuse or dishonest, empty, bullshitty use of the jargon.

Congrats on the family, business, and studies - that is a pretty full plate. I do appreciate you taking the time - a very important step in learning about something is knowing enough to ask the first couple intelligent questions to someone of the discipline. Cheers for that.

Thanks.

(Mind you, I'm still not convinced this is worthwhile, since it appears that the point could be made more clearly without the linguistic exercise, but I haven't made any attempt to read the original so I know that's not entirely fair.)

It's that until you've at least acquired core competence in Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud and Levinas, being exposed to the OT VIII levels of post-structuralist theory is likely to cause your brain to explode.