Comment by DonbunEf7 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DonbunEf7 | Hacker News Reader

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Deconstruction is a way of viewing reality which comes naturally equipped with a process for disassembling ideas (the "deconstructive process") as well as a process for viewing ideas as the synthesis of other ideas (the "constructive process"). The core is this: all semantics are relative, all observations surface-level, and all truths buried in the raw materials. But since the materials are themselves relative, all truths are ultimately undefinable, recursively unknowable. To see a house is to know that it was built on a foundation, that its walls are made of gypsum, and that the number of children living there are proportional to the number of toys left on the lawn. Conversely, to see a corporate email thread is to know the shape of the corporate power structure, the bickering between departments, the products under development, and the CEO's ability to curse. Everything is connected and related. This is the entailment of postmodernism, where we first glimpsed that narrative truths could be relative; now, we know that reality itself is relative, whether it is the reality of a book or the reality of our current "real-world" narrative.

Deconstruction isn't bullshit, but we've been swimming in deconstructive and reconstructive narrative media for nearly half a century, and it has altered how we critique media so heavily that people don't see it as a distinct feature of their worldview. (Great example: Folks seem to love Rick & Morty, a deconstructive soft sci-fi serial, and also Steven Universe, a reconstructive soft sci-fi serial, both of which are running on a network which markets to youth, not literature postdocs.)

Kay, like Derrida, hasn't been unable to explain to people for lack of words, but because the enormity of the paradigm shift means that no number of words will necessarily suffice.

(Aside: If you are rubbed wrong by the first paragraph, in particular because you believe that reality is absolute or that truth is definable, then do not fear. You are merely having trouble overcoming instincts. Trust in mathematics; postmodernism arrived in mathematics in 1874, was completed in 1930, and is widely accepted by the mathematical community as meta-truth. Dissenters exist but necessarily must accept the meta-truth ("There is no one true foundation for mathematics.") to avoid being laughed out of the room.)

I am far from an expert in Deconstruction, but I am an expert in mathematics and have read a fair amount on the foundations of mathematics. I find your description technically correct, but highly misleading.

The vast majority of mathematicians will agree with "no one true foundation". However, unlike the bulk of postmodern/deconstructive work, they are then perfectly happy to say "this particular foundation is good enough to explore some interesting ideas", as opposed to wallowing in the fact that they had to take a generative step to create the mooring of their meaning.

In my non-expert opinion, I think many people instinctively rebel against Deconstruction, not because they can't accept that there has to be a faith-act to pragmatically root meaning... but because Deconstructionists, having discovered that such faith acts are necessary, then refuse to engage with any particular choice made by people who want to discuss pragmatic meaning.

Mathematicians have long ago internalized the important, but ultimately quite limited, idea behind Deconstruction (which, by the way, they didn't need Deconstructionists to tell them, since the idea of having to subjectively choose an axiom system goes back at least to the Greeks). Having understood this, they have since moved on with their lives to continue to do important and valuable things, just as they were doing before. What have the Deconstructionists done?

"Deconstructionists, having discovered that such faith acts are necessary, then refuse to engage with any particular choice made by people who want to discuss pragmatic meaning." I'm perfectly happy to have such discussions, as long as it's understood that, regardless of the beliefs brought to the table, the idea of "good enough" is not set in stone and itself is a perspective that is also brought to the table. I'm also not a Deconstructionist, whatever that is.

I find that most arguments that I have had with people usually end with them implying that their epistemology is rooted in something that is "good" or "reasonable" or "close enough" without any explanation of why it is that their chosen way of looking at the world must necessarily be beneficial. Indeed, you have pointed out that maths is a source of "important and valuable things", which I could agree with, but only with the understanding that our agreement is bound to the reality defined by our joint observations, and not a universal truth.

My point was not about choosing axioms, but about incompleteness, undefinability, uncomputability, etc., which cut short any attempts to bless a particular set of axioms as uniquely correct. You are only seeing the surface level so far; I assure you that it all deconstructs. (Be careful when looking directly at The Void.)

Finally: Where does meaning come from when having dialogues? Hofstadter explains it well: We constantly exchange deeply-coded messages with recursive layers of meaning, trying to reflect the symbols in our mind into words which we think will reconstruct those symbols in the minds we talk to. The "mooring of their meaning" is a fascinating illusion based on the inherent difficulty of stepping outside ourselves to examine where our own sense of meaning comes from.

> What have the Deconstructionists done?

Deconstruction changed the way we think about what we read, see, and hear, and taught us to question the assumptions inherent in the same. It gave us the spaghetti western, cyberpunk, and arguably punk rock itself (and it definitely influenced hip hop and dub).

Always remember that postmodernism is "defense against the dark arts" for the left. The techniques of playing shell games with symbol and meaning were devised by the right and by corporations and weaponized against us; postmodernism exists to make us aware of these techniques.

But I didn't really bring up the Derrida fan to argue about deconstruction or postmodernist thought.

> Deconstruction changed the way we think about what we read, see, and hear, and taught us to question the assumptions inherent in the same. It gave us the spaghetti western, cyberpunk, and arguably punk rock itself (and it definitely influenced hip hop and dub).

I've seen related claims before, and, having attempted to dig into them, my impression as a lay person is that what is called "postmodern literature" is actually not obviously connected to postmodern thought and deconstruction.

I personally find, for example, the idea of an unreliable narrator or non-linear storytelling not to be obviously derived from the idea of the subjectivity of anchors of truth. There are of course superficial similarities, but I see no evidence that the academic and philosophical ideas were in any way necessary for the literary, musical, and cinematic ideas. My feeling about the alleged similarities is about the same as the claims that Cubism was deeply connected to allegedly parallel ideas in the physics of relativity -- ideas that would pass in an art house, given enough narcotics, but that do not withstand serious scrutiny if one actually knows anything about the origins of ideas in physics.

So I wonder if you would be able to draw me a straight line from, say, Derrida to The Sex Pistols? Or to explain to me how Gibson's Neuromancer would not exist but for Foucault? These are not rhetorical questions -- I would be truly grateful to receive a good answer, and it might just turn around my generally low opinion of the post-60s contributions of postmodernism and deconstruction.

It's given us a framework to understand what's going on in a world with fake news. Arguably, Deconstructionists made Trump possible.

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