Why I Am (Not) A Deconstructionist

Everyone in the orbit of academic culture talks about deconstructing things. You hear it not just in grad seminars, but in yeshivot and corporate diversity trainings. If I had a nickel for every time someone used the word deconstruct simply to mean challenge…

One deconstructs race, class, gender, class, nation, as well as literary texts, theological concepts, and legal documents. Above all, one deconstructs the words of one’s opponents and enemies. Think of deconstruction in modern parlance as “mansplaining” when done by the goodies.

In everyday use, to deconstruct means one or more of the following:

a) to criticize b) to delegitimate c) to uncover a hidden meaning or agenda d) to analyze

Most of the people who throw the word around today are unaware of its high octane origins in Derrida’s appropriation of Heidegger’s term Destruktion, employed in the introduction to Being and Time. For Heidegger, Destruktion meant to reveal an unthought dimension to the philosophical tradition. For Derrida and his followers it became a technique for showing a text to have multiple (conflicting) layers of meaning, multiple vectors of concern. Plato’s text, the Phaedrus, for instance, presents as an argument against writing, but in Derrida’s deconstructive hands, becomes an ambivalent defense of it.

Deconstruction, whether of the Heideggerian or Derridean variety, is an argument for irony, as Quintillian defined it: “saying something other than what we mean.” If it’s impossible to say what we mean then we are susceptible to being “deconstructed.”

In what follows I’m going to offer my best defense and criticism of deconstruction, in the more philosophical sense, so that you can decide whether it’s for you:

Pro

• Deconstruction is a way of saving texts, people, and ideas that we don’t entirely agree with (or that we find fundamentally objectionable) by allowing us to focus on either the things we do like and do find useful. It also allows us to harvest new, creative meanings from texts and peoples rather than rely on having to prove that our interpretations are “scientific,” i.e., what the author really intended. (Deconstruction is on the opposite side of the spectrum as originalism.)

• Deconstruction, although a tactic that became popular on the cultural academic left, is actually a prophylactic against “cancel culture,” in that it promotes engagement with difficult texts, if only to redeem them or retrieve something other than what they seem to say. On one level, it’s generous.

• Deconstruction is focused on possibilities, rather than actualities, which means its a freeing exercise. A person’s words are a pathway, not an authoritative or authoritarian command.

• Deconstruction identifies a universal human truth, namely, that our experience is often unstable and uncertain, ambivalent, doubtful, multi-factoral. It’s the rhetorical equivalent of Einsteinian physics in a world whose default assumptions are Newtonian.

Con

• Insofar as deconstruction is a method, it’s just as fundamentalist and narrow minded as all that came before. Derrida and his followers are just as rigid as any school they seek to replace. Human error and sinfulness will not be saved by a new way of reading texts or seeing the world.

• Deconstruction isn’t charitable, it’s suspicious, since it assumes that the best reading is something other than what the text or person seems to say on a plain level. It’s a form of conspiratorial thinking, even if no conspirators can be found (the protagonists are often abstract nouns: Capital, Metaphysics, Certainty, etc.)

• Deconstruction as a philosophical tendency leads directly to deconstruction in the pop cultural senss of the word. What both have in common is a lack of loyalty to anything with a proper name (except Deconstruction itself), and instead a humdrum nihilism. Things that get deconstructed don’t often remain objects of joy, belief, or hope. Let’s just call deconstructionists what they are and have always been: “critics.” Of course, criticism is a healthy and useful, but unending criticism as a way of being is toxic.

• Deconstruction should be applied universally, to all texts and ideas, but in reality becomes selectively weaponized. One doesn’t deconstruct oneself and one’s friends—only one’s opponents. But then deconstruction isn’t doing any real work. It’s just a fad we use to give cover to pre-existent animosities.

• The utilitarian critique (as advanced by Martha Nussbaum): deconstructionists over-estimate the gains their method will provide society. If you want to win in politics, culture, or law you have to play the game. Deconstruction is a form of protest, an acting out, and opting out, but is ineffective in the Newtonian world.

Now that I’ve deconstructed Deconstruction, please deconstruct me.

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