Comment by rmk2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rmk2 | Hacker News Reader

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Using deconstruction as a method is stupid, and misses the point entirely. At the same time, this article makes me simultaneously mad and sad, though I am sure it will serve to reinforce preexisting biases just fine, especially here.

Using deconstruction as a method, independent and decoupled of its own genesis, does not make sense and will yield little of use. The whole point of deconstruction is to oppose another strand of Western philosophy that, depending on country, has reigned for centuries: idealism.

Now, I realise it's cool to "show" how much superior and empirical engineering is, but idealism is a root of many causes. It has fundamentally shaped our ideas of the University, of statehood, nation, authorship, race and the sciences. Many of the subsequent movements, starting with Marxism, followed by Nietzsche, the New Left, and deconstruction (which, really, is called poststructuralism) are an undertaking to undo some of the damage idealist reign has caused during its reign.

Deconstruction aims to undermine the very hierarchies idealist thought has errected: the nation as the culture of a given, demarkated and distinct people, university as a structure of educating state servants, authorship as the translation of Geist into matter, science as the study of matter, leading to the ultimate victory of ratio and empiricism.

If people talk about advanced programming techniques without knowing anything about underlying compiler design, algorithms etc, they are ridiculed and set in their place. If people talk about history of thought without having any idea what they are talking about, they are applauded while people cheer for their (and their own) ignorance. Why is that?

Deconstruction without its history is worthless. That, however, also suggests that for a history of thought, for an understanding of our present, deconstruction is indeed relevant.

If Deconstruction were a meaningful thing, if there were actual ways in which it is relevant that one could point to, then there would be a Wikipedia article that says what it is and explains why it is relevant.

Say what you want about Wikipedia's internal processes (if you must), but it does an overwhelmingly good job at saying what things are, including schools of thought and beliefs. Even through the edit wars, it can explain the most controversial tenets of religions, where the stakes are much higher than poststructuralism and stuff.

But the Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstruction has been an incoherent disaster for over a decade. It's not even much of an edit war, just a stagnant mess. Everyone agrees that it is bad. Nobody agrees on what to do about it.

The disagreement is not between literary theorists and sciencey types. The disagreement is between literary theorists and other literary theorists, whose only unified view is that sciencey types should not be writing the article. Occasionally one of them will wholly rewrite the article, at which point everyone else says, basically, "wtf did you just write", and the list of problems gets longer.

My personal conclusion is that, while you criticize people who "talk about history of thought without having any idea what they are talking about", the people who do have an idea what they are talking about on this topic don't exist.

On the other hand, I think the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's article on Derrida does a pretty solid job of summarizing at least Derrida's stated definition(s) of "Deconstruction:"

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/derrida/#Dec

It's still dense and a bit jargon-y, but relatively easy to follow linearly.

The second you get into "X thinks Y about Deconstruction" or "X's work relates to Deconstruction because Y" (which is most of the Wikipedia article), the whole thing seems incredibly unapproachable without being an expert on the entire canon of western philosophy. This is unreasonable for something that's really a pretty simple concept.

This sort of argument is very common (from my experience) in contemporary philosophy: "Your work on X is invalid because you didn't consider how it relates to Y." Despite the fact that that is a fallacy, covering all the "it relates to Ys" seems to be a primary goal of the Wikipedia article.

It started promisingly. Then it said at the end of the first paragraph,

> But with Derrida, we know now, the foundation is not a unified self but a divisible limit between myself and myself as an other (auto-affection as hetero-affection: “origin-heterogeneous”).

That's bullshit intended to baffle.

There are some extra adjectives in there, maybe, but it's really not that bad.

Translation: "Maybe the self is not the unitary thing we normally consider it to be. But how can that be possible? For example, if it has multiple parts, couldn't we just say that only one of those parts is the self? Where does the multi-faceted nature come from? Is it merely the grammatical division between subject and object -- are there two selves in the sentence 'I affect myself'?" Etc.

I agree that the writing is a little silly (that parenthetical should be its own sentence), but it's partly because the ideas are just pretty hard to think about.

> Is it merely the grammatical division between subject and object -- are there two selves in the sentence 'I affect myself'?

No, there aren't, though I don't see why that has anything to do with the paragraph in question.

Are you saying that the foundation of Deconstruction itself rests on a violation of the use-mention distinction as obvious and pithy as "there is no 'I' in 'team'"?

I'm just saying there are many different ideas at play here. Those are a couple of examples of possible meanings I took from that sentence, just off the top of my head. My implication (which maybe I should have stated) was that if I can derive meaning from the sentence, then it might not be meaningless. And if the meaning I derive corresponds to what the author intended, then it doesn't seem like such terrible writing, just writing for a particular audience.

I agree with you, though, that it should be more accessible, though articles on the Stanford Encyclopedia can often be fairly technical. But it really takes a brilliant writer (which the author of the SEP article clearly is not) to make accessible something complicated and arcane. I just don't want you to draw the conclusion that because this guy couldn't do it in this particular sentence, a whole field of thought is crap. Or unfairly ascribe bad intentions to the author.

The sentence (non-parenthetical) is poorly placed, in that it can't really be understood until actually reading the rest of the section. Something like, "according to Deconstruction, the resolution to this critique of Descartes is actually that the 'foundation' is the limit or difference [or différance, if I understand it correctly, which I probably don't] between self/other."

The parenthetical is complete and utter bullshit, as if somebody said "this is good, but you should jargon it up a bit."

> If Deconstruction were a meaningful thing

Deconstruction is not a "thing". Neither is "empiricism". They are modes of enquiry. Both position you in a certain mode towards your surrounding environment, be it political, social or scientific. They both open certain modes of enquiry while excluding others. One conclusion that one can draw from deconstruction (if we "apply" it onto itself) is that no answer one can ever give will be without bias or will completely exclude any other option.

Jürgen Habermas coined, in his Systemtheorie, the notion of the nth grade observer, where every degree of observer may observe another onlooker and his specific bias and blind spot, yet each degree of observation always introduces its own, new blind spot.

When Derrida talks about archi-écriture, what he says is that if there was ever an all-encompassing entirety of meaning that only had one singly way of interpretation, then this unity is a mythical one which cannot be recovered. Every utterance, every decision has the inherent option of an opposition.

Derrida is Hegel upside down. If Hegel sees Geist as the unity of matter and spirit, then for Derrida, this unity might have existed in an archaic past but has since been lost and cannot be put back together. Hence, whatever we do will not empty out all possible interpretations and views of life, there will be no single answer to the meaning of life or some such. Instead, all that remains is the fundamental idea that every utterance and every positions carries within itself already the means to disprove it.

This is not fundamentally different to the scientific method. The atom was thought to be the smallest, inseperable unit (hence the name) before it could be found. However, in finding the atom, we realised that it is, indeed, made up of smaller parts, which in turn are again made up of smaller parts. What was taken as an absolute minimum was, in fact, only the temporary minimum before we could conceive smaller units. The same, just in reverse, goes for the solar system, galaxies etc.

Don't say that your belief system is comparable to science. Only the gullible will believe you, and it makes you sound like you are preaching a religion.

Where, exactly, have I talked about a "belief system"? Seeing deconstruction as part of a historical history of thought does not mean I subscribe to it as a quasi-religious belief system, so please stop pretending as much. In fact, I would argue that my belief system is quite a bit further removed from any form of religious thought than you might think, since I do not, in fact believe, in infallible systems; I'd rather look at the systems in their environment, the institutions establishing and supporting them and the structures underneath which power them and which stand to gain from them.

> Deconstruction is not a "thing". Neither is "empiricism". They are modes of enquiry.

In current times the term thing applies also to non-physical entities. As such, a mode of enquiry is a thing.

Otherwise, i like the rest of your explanation.

> Every utterance, every decision has the inherent option of an opposition.

To the extent this is meaningful at all, it implies that it is not true in the slightest, which makes it difficult to take seriously.

> This is not fundamentally different to the scientific method. The atom was thought to be the smallest, inseperable unit (hence the name) before it could be found. However, in finding the atom, we realised that it is, indeed, made up of smaller parts, which in turn are again made up of smaller parts.

Until that process bottomed out, of course, and bottomed out based on evidence, not philosophy.

Here are some facts:

1) If one can construct something, one can deconstruct it.

2) Derrida was a guy who existed.

If you have an idea for a single Wikipedia page that can resolve these two impossible contradictions, then you are a person who has an idea.

(edit: The grandparent poster's error was in making sweeping generalizations about capital D versus little D without mentioning the difference.)

(second edit: the Wikipedia page on Deconstruction is the quintessential case of original research?)

Wat.

I don't know what you're trying to say, but "Derrida was a guy who existed" is not, in reality, an "impossible contradiction". It's just true. Your first statement, on the other hand, sounds either meaningless or false.

I think I agree with you, though, that the Wikipedia page on Deconstruction is "the quintessential case of original research".

Now you can cite this conversation when editing it.

The disagreement is not between literary theorists and sciencey types

Sometimes it is! (http://www.amazon.com/Fashionable-Nonsense-Postmodern-Intell...)

Despite minoring in philosophy, I fail to see how one can expect anything but a victory for empiricism.

I'm reminded of David Hume's justification for the continued use of induction despite no solid theoretical justification for its correctness: we are creatures of empiricism and it is in our very nature to believe in that which works. For all the criticism, I do not often find people criticizing the effectiveness of empiricism.

I majored in philosophy, and consider "deconstruction" as a philosophical tool for analyzing empirical philosophy.

The problem with anyone who majored in philosophy is that they will switch between big-D and little-D while expecting everyone around them to code switch at the same pace.

This is also true for any given smartass who never gave a flying fuck about Derrida.

There is some weight in looking at the article as being about deconstruction, what with the title saying so. However, the most important take away, I think, is the effects of isolation on any field of study: "It is a cautionary lesson about the consequences of allowing a branch of academia that has been entrusted with the study of important problems to become isolated and inbred."

I agree with you on the isolation point, though the original article is far from expressing that clearly. This isolation is perhaps part of the reason why so many literary scholars start to include more and more cultural studies, which is usually regarded as a route of the self-imposed solipsism of literary criticism. Cultural studies, then, allows for a more direct interaction (and questioning) of power structures, institutions, ontology, humanity and categories such as history.

In semi-fairness(?) to trend-following humanities scholars, deconstruction is a little bit passe by now anyway. (It's telling that the article we're talking about is from 1993). Badiou is the big new star, Deleuze/Guattari is much edgier, and Zizek has a stranglehold on the mass teenybopper market. Deconstruction still retains some following but some people kept Yahoo as their homepage all through the 00's.

It's useful as an intellectual exercise to analyze the theoretical merits and shortcomings of deconstruction, but because I'm a basically shallow person I'd like to point out that in terms of hipness and relevance we may as well be analyzing the music of Hall & Oates.

Maybe Chip's colleague Doug should write a book called: "Deconstruction: The Good Parts".

The academics have suffered the fate reserved for those who do not engage with the outside: had they spent time writing books for the common man, had they spent time exposing idealism (ill-defined here as you've left it) and motivating the need for deconstruction, had they done any of these things they would not be viewed with such ridicule.

I will even suppose that something useful and important is being done in those fields--nevertheless, at the end of the day, I can point to my computer or bike and say "Engineering and hard science made this possible", and they can't point to a damned thing anyone cares about.

Exactly!! If the goal is to fight against entrenched assumptions from past ideology which has caused injustice etc. then most postmodernism is utter failure. The part that has made some worthy progress is pretty much the same as the part that isn't absorbed entirely in the world of postmodern thought.

Here's a simple analogy: I am a teacher. My student is failing to learn something. There may be several factors in play, but the first thing I should do is check if I could do better as a teacher. Postmodern academics have mostly failed to be truly sensitive to how their ideas are coming across to others at all, so they aren't even at the point where they could figure out if they need to revamp their teaching approach.

I will even suppose that something useful and important is being done in those fields--nevertheless, at the end of the day, I can point to my computer or bike and say "Engineering and hard science made this possible", and they can't point to a damned thing anyone cares about.

Ahem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Simpsons

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