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Derrida's deconstruction technique.

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  • 05-04-2015 5:45am
    #1
    Torakx
    Registered Users Posts: 3,831 ✭✭✭


    I have watched a couple of university lectures on deconstruction and I am finally starting to get it.
    While reading a law school paper on deconstructing constitutional law, I found that the examples given over and over, are multiple uses of deconstruction and really helped it to sink in.
    30-40 minutes into this video there is a visual explanation of the "mechanics" at work.
    Ethan Kleinberg: Derrida & Deconstruction(youtube video)

    And the paper on law: Aspects of Deconstruction: The "Easy Case" of the Under-Aged President.


    I have heard anecdotes about Derrida in court(which I still can't find online), specifically a youtube video lecture, Wes Cecil: The Life and Philosophy of Derrida(highly reccomended, very funny). To the effect that the judges could not pin him down on anything solid. He kept deconstructing the words used, shifting the posts.
    So having a small interest in law and court proceedings, I am hoping I can get some feedback on deconstruction, as a philosophical concept applied to court law. Is there room for deconstruction in a hierarchical system like law?
    This might come close to being more on the topic of law than philosophy. But maybe Derrida would bail me out if that issue comes up. :)
    I would like to get better at deconstruction, so that is another reason for the thread.
    For people to get some practise here.
    If you get bored, just deconstruct a post above. This thread could be a record breaker, in theory :p

    What is the structuralist counter to deconstruction?
    That the method of deconstruction is in itself a structure of signifiers?
    And then Derrida would deconstruct the signifiers?
    I haven't gotten to the signifier part yet, with regards his philosophy.


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    #2
    Black Swan
    Moderators, Category Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 47,223 CMod ✭✭✭✭Black Swan


    Torakx wrote: »
    I would like to get better at deconstruction, so that is another reason for the thread.
    Torakx wrote: »
    I haven't gotten to the signifier part yet, with regards his philosophy.
    Jacques Derrida typically appeared in the philosophical domain and was considered postmodern, but he had no codified philosophy, per se, rather he deconstructed the philosophical positions of others; i.e., he was a methodologist.
    Torakx wrote: »
    What is the structuralist counter to deconstruction?
    Ferdinand de Saussure, who was also an important linguist, was a structuralist deconstructed by Derrida, as was Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose "writing lesson" was the basis of his form of structuralism, also deconstructed by Derrida.


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    #3
    KomradeBishop
    Closed Accounts Posts: 4,981 ✭✭✭KomradeBishop


    My own impression of deconstruction so far, is that it is largely just playing with semantics - exploiting the often ambiguous definition of words, to try and render statements that other people make, as being totally meaningless - completely ignoring the context and intent of what the person meant, with the words they used when making the statement. You can render meaningless, pretty much anything, using this technique - so it seems to have no constructive use whatsoever.

    It takes 'rules lawyering' to a ridiculous extreme, and seems to me to be highly anti-intellectual really (fitting in with most other Postmodern stuff in that regard) - and reminds me a bit of 1984, where literally removing words from the English language, was used as a way to try and constrain people intellectually.

    Some posters on Boards actually seem to use a variation of it in debate, and because it is ignoring the context/intent behind what is said, it just comes across as highly disingenuous - a form of 'tactical stupidity' ;)

    Maybe there are positive aspects to it, but if there are, they aren't at all obvious to me.


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    #4
    Black Swan
    Moderators, Category Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 47,223 CMod ✭✭✭✭Black Swan


    KomradeBishop wrote: »
    My own impression of deconstruction so far, is that it is largely just playing with semantics -
    Way beyond mere semantics, I've found his deconstructive methodology quite useful when examining the philosophical, theological, and theoretical constructs of established positions. His treatment of dichotomies was but one example of many.

    Jacques Derrida often deconstructs the use of dichotomies, suggesting that many (not all) of these mutually exclusive nominal categorisations were considerably limited, all too often failing to account for the multivariate and interactive complexities that exist in our natural world. Furthermore, he had cautioned that many (not all) of these dichotomies were value-laden distortions of reality, to where on the surface they may appear to be simple either/or nominal categorisations, but when examined in depth exhibited a preference hierarchy skewed and value-biased favouring one side over the other by the classifying person, authority, conceptual framework, or belief system.

    The metaphysics of the Western philosophical tradition ranging as far back as Plato relied all too often upon binary oppositions (i.e., dichotomies) that influenced dominant ways of thinking, as did Western and Middle Eastern theological belief systems (e.g., good and evil, etc.). One approach to exploring these systems of thought and belief advocated and applied by Derrida was to examine their dichotomies.


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    #5
    Torakx
    Registered Users Posts: 3,831 ✭✭✭Torakx


    I would love to weigh in more on this topic, but I am already feeling that I am losing grasp of the idea and method...
    I'd appreciate someone deconstructing my posts or statements, just to help me see it in practise. I keep watching videos etc, but I need homework to make it sink in.

    For example, could someone deconstruct one of the following random statements?

    The sun is larger than the earth.

    Fish can swim.

    I am alive and breathing.


    I'm not sure if they are good examples, but if anything can be deconstructed.....

    My own attempt at the first statement might show how much or little I understand.

    From the perspective of a human on the earth, the sun is tiny and the earth is huge. Therefore the earth is larger than the sun.

    From the visual explanation of the method, you make something that was small, so big that it inverts in on itself to make it the opposite. Which I am not sure I have done. I just changed perspective....
    But maybe perspective was the "pivot" point for that arguement?
    Although I am having trouble finding the binary aspect to that one.


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    #6
    KomradeBishop
    Closed Accounts Posts: 4,981 ✭✭✭KomradeBishop


    Black Swan wrote: »
    Way beyond mere semantics, I've found his deconstructive methodology quite useful when examining the philosophical, theological, and theoretical constructs of established positions. His treatment of dichotomies was but one example of many.

    Jacques Derrida often deconstructs the use of dichotomies, suggesting that many (not all) of these mutually exclusive nominal categorisations were considerably limited, all too often failing to account for the multivariate and interactive complexities that exist in our natural world. Furthermore, he had cautioned that many (not all) of these dichotomies were value-laden distortions of reality, to where on the surface they may appear to be simple either/or nominal categorisations, but when examined in depth exhibited a preference hierarchy skewed and value-biased favouring one side over the other by the classifying person, authority, conceptual framework, or belief system.

    The metaphysics of the Western philosophical tradition ranging as far back as Plato relied all too often upon binary oppositions (i.e., dichotomies) that influenced dominant ways of thinking, as did Western and Middle Eastern theological belief systems (e.g., good and evil, etc.). One approach to exploring these systems of thought and belief advocated and applied by Derrida was to examine their dichotomies.
    Okey, that suggests a lot more nuance than my initial impression - how would deconstruction be applied to taking apart good vs evil, for example?
    For instance, it would be different I assume, to just pointing out, that things are not black and white, and that generalizations are often unbacked and/or wrong?

    One of the problems with reading up about deconstruction, is that there isn't a whole lot of accessible writing on it, to help with understanding it.


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    #7
    KomradeBishop
    Closed Accounts Posts: 4,981 ✭✭✭KomradeBishop


    Also, does deconstruction have any relation to Dialectics? It seems familiar to that, in some respects - and some dialectics provide a very interesting way of looking at issues - but unfortunately, it seems to be just as impenetrable a topic, and there isn't really a whole lot of clear writing on it.


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    #8
    Black Swan
    Moderators, Category Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 47,223 CMod ✭✭✭✭Black Swan


    KomradeBishop wrote: »
    One of the problems with reading up about deconstruction, is that there isn't a whole lot of accessible writing on it, to help with understanding it.
    Derrida's Of Grammatology (1967) has been often cited as a foundational text for deconstructive criticism, but I find it a challenge to read and understand, which may in part be due to something being lost in translation from French to English. Another book called Points (1992), which contains 23 interviews from 1974 to 1994 represents perhaps the most succinct, lucid, and easy to read explications of Derrida's deconstruction methodology and thoughts.

    When first struggling with Of Grammatology, I sought other interpretive sources that had reviewed it, and found a tiny paperback book of about 80 pages called Derrida (1997) by Christopher Johnson (part of The Great Philosophers series). It was probably a conference paper later published as a book, that gave an outstanding step-by-step Derridean deconstruction of the Claude Lévi-Strauss structuralist position.


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    #9
    Black Swan
    Moderators, Category Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 47,223 CMod ✭✭✭✭Black Swan


    KomradeBishop wrote: »
    Also, does deconstruction have any relation to Dialectics? It seems familiar to that, in some respects - and some dialectics provide a very interesting way of looking at issues - but unfortunately, it seems to be just as impenetrable a topic, and there isn't really a whole lot of clear writing on it.
    Dialectics is a very complex topic with multiple definitions, which may or may not apply to deconstruction depending upon the definition used for discussion purposes.

    Rather than approach dialectics from a Derridean perspective, I prefer that of Paulo Freire who uses critical pedagogy to find hidden underlying meanings through his method of dialogue when examining education and learning praxis. Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968) was a good read in terms of his methodology and philosophical thoughts.


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    #10
    zeffabelli
    Closed Accounts Posts: 2,516 ✭✭✭zeffabelli


    To put it very reductively, Derrida posits that we are habiutalised to binary thinking and that this thinking is created by language itself.

    Woman/man. Black/white. Cat/dog. Heaven/hell.

    The square root of all language is bad/good. So that woman/man for example, has latent morality in it. Woman =bad, man =good. The "good" usually refers then to the dominant value, and the bad is the particularised value. The particularised value because it is "different," because it is deviant, is square rooted by latent negative morality.

    What deconstruction does in interepretation is destroy the centrality of a text and reconstruct it.

    So for example, in a piece of writing where you have a criminal, liKe Dorian Grey or Hester Prynn, a deconstructionist will turn topsy turvy and make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven.

    If you have let's say a bad guy go to prison, but the writer lets say inserts a piece of information that it was the same prison Martin Luther King was placed in, this changes the moral value of how we read the story. Meaning is inherintly unstable.

    Kids are natural deconstructers. LEts say your teacher tells you to write a 6 page essay. A deconstructionist might write one on A5 pages, they might write one word per page, they might write backwards, they might alter the meaning of the instruction in any means of multiple ways.


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    #11
    LadyAthame
    Closed Accounts Posts: 793 ✭✭✭LadyAthame


    I don't rate Derrida very highly.

    He gives apophatic definitions. And it gives room for a lot of vagueness. It's not a method, it's not an analysis.....it's not this or that...rather than what it is. Specific philosophical ideas from him are few and it seems to me he writes and writes rather than contrives any. He lacks academic rigor. Apophatic theology for example states humans can only know god by saying what god is not ...because we cannot know god...god is unknowable. It can be an easy way of dispelling criticism.

    He is deliberately obscure this is partially due to the influence of Nietzsche. But Nietzsche used it much more effectively. And Nietzsche was constantly asking the reader what they think. Whereas Derrida insists upon the psychological study of language sometimes to the loss of rational discourse. Language in context overrides reason sometimes with Derrida.

    The Sokkal affair sums up a lot of what I am saying.

    It's not always clear if he is presenting a way of deconstruction or describing how he sees society does it.

    He drew on a lot of Heidegger and Husserl. And presented with Nietzsche's style.

    Derrida does not want to define deconstruction only really what it is not or who is more likely to do it and who is not. Like Zeffabelli says above kids are more likely to. People in positions of authority might not be.

    In response to the Dialectics question by KB I would say no ..to establish a definition with reasoned arguments rather than deconstruct the tranquility of that definition and structure of reason.


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    #12
    zeffabelli
    Closed Accounts Posts: 2,516 ✭✭✭zeffabelli


    LadyAthame wrote: »
    I don't rate Derrida very highly.

    He gives apophatic definitions. And it gives room for a lot of vagueness. It's not a method, it's not an analysis.....it's not this or that...rather than what it is. Specific philosophical ideas from him are few and it seems to me he writes and writes rather than contrives any. He lacks academic rigor.

    He is deliberately obscure this is partially due to the influence of Nietzsche. But Nietzsche used it much more effectively. And Nietzsche was constantly asking the reader what they think. Whereas Derrida insists upon the psychological study of language sometimes to the loss of rational discourse. Language in context overrides reason sometimes with Derrida.

    The Sokkal affair sums up a lot of what I am saying.

    It's not always clear if he is presenting a way of deconstruction or describing how he sees society does it.

    He drew on a lot of Heidegger and Husserl. And presented with Nietzsche's style.

    Derrida does not want to define deconstruction only really what it is not or who is more likely to do it and who is not. Like Zeffabelli says above kids are more likely to. People in positions of authority might not be.

    In response to the Dialectics question by KB I would say no ..to establish a definition with reasoned arguments rather than deconstruct the tranquility of that definition and structure of reason.



    The Torah is a good example also. You have a central text and then around it you have other Rabbi's comments. It is debate enshrined.

    If you take a concept like betrayal, which we have all ingrained in our heads as bad, and loyalty is good, and turn it on its head, one could see it in contexts as a good thing. Adam Phillips, a British psychoanalyst, wrote an essay called "In Praise of Judas, " in which he argues the benefits of betrayal, perhaps even its necessity to our growth.

    This is a very good example of the deconstruction of a commonly known myth.


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    #13
    KomradeBishop
    Closed Accounts Posts: 4,981 ✭✭✭KomradeBishop


    LadyAthame wrote: »
    I don't rate Derrida very highly.

    He gives apophatic definitions. And it gives room for a lot of vagueness. It's not a method, it's not an analysis.....it's not this or that...rather than what it is. Specific philosophical ideas from him are few and it seems to me he writes and writes rather than contrives any. He lacks academic rigor. Apophatic theology for example states humans can only know god by saying what god is not ...because we cannot know god...god is unknowable. It can be an easy way of dispelling criticism.

    He is deliberately obscure this is partially due to the influence of Nietzsche. But Nietzsche used it much more effectively. And Nietzsche was constantly asking the reader what they think. Whereas Derrida insists upon the psychological study of language sometimes to the loss of rational discourse. Language in context overrides reason sometimes with Derrida.

    The Sokkal affair sums up a lot of what I am saying.

    It's not always clear if he is presenting a way of deconstruction or describing how he sees society does it.

    He drew on a lot of Heidegger and Husserl. And presented with Nietzsche's style.

    Derrida does not want to define deconstruction only really what it is not or who is more likely to do it and who is not. Like Zeffabelli says above kids are more likely to. People in positions of authority might not be.

    In response to the Dialectics question by KB I would say no ..to establish a definition with reasoned arguments rather than deconstruct the tranquility of that definition and structure of reason.
    Thanks, that's a very good/thorough description, of the kind of problems I felt Derrida/deconstruction might have - especially linking it up with the Sokkal affair :) - that would definitely make me more wary of him and deconstruction.

    To be honest, that's why I am very wary of quite a lot of philosophy, as a subject in general - there seems to be quite a lot of stuff which is discreditable, and which uses obfuscation to try and maintain credibility - and that's the impression I get with Derrida.

    That's why I'm such a fan of topics like Agnotolgy and the like, which I have a topic on here - if I wasn't on the lookout for things such as use of obfuscation combined with large unwieldy texts, as a massive warning sign indicating that there's something wrong/deceptive about a topic, then I'd be at risk of wasting a large amount of time trying to learn about the topic - or worse, I might give it benefit of the doubt and not have my guard up, and end up being indoctrinated into believing it, even if it may be discreditable.

    I consider critical thinking skills like that, and being constantly on guard against potentially dubious information, as essential for avoiding being indoctrinated into adapting or believing stuff which is dubious or not true - so I approach every topic critically/skeptically like that.


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    #14
    zeffabelli
    Closed Accounts Posts: 2,516 ✭✭✭zeffabelli


    KomradeBishop wrote: »
    Thanks, that's a very good/thorough description, of the kind of problems I felt Derrida/deconstruction might have - especially linking it up with the Sokkal affair :) - that would definitely make me more wary of him and deconstruction.

    To be honest, that's why I am very wary of quite a lot of philosophy, as a subject in general - there seems to be quite a lot of stuff which is discreditable, and which uses obfuscation to try and maintain credibility - and that's the impression I get with Derrida.

    That's why I'm such a fan of topics like Agnotolgy and the like, which I have a topic on here - if I wasn't on the lookout for things such as use of obfuscation combined with large unwieldy texts, as a massive warning sign indicating that there's something wrong/deceptive about a topic, then I'd be at risk of wasting a large amount of time trying to learn about the topic - or worse, I might give it benefit of the doubt and not have my guard up, and end up being indoctrinated into believing it, even if it may be discreditable.

    I consider critical thinking skills like that, and being constantly on guard against potentially dubious information, as essential for avoiding being indoctrinated into adapting or believing stuff which is dubious or not true - so I approach every topic critically/skeptically like that.

    Thing is philosophy, like poetry has always pushed language, because it has to.

    But yes in my experience, the Frenchies are the worst for what you are talking about. Particularly French feminist marxists.....

    My dad used to say academics write like this because no one ever asked them to dance in high school. :)


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    #15
    LadyAthame
    Closed Accounts Posts: 793 ✭✭✭LadyAthame


    It's interesting. It illustrates perhaps in the extreme the difference between European philosophy and British/American philosophy. European is considered quite soft and lacking rigor. It's a little off topic but take Derrida and Bertrand Russel/Wittgenstein for instance. I know that in Europe they veered away from teaching logic, metaphysics and Analytical philosophy, whereas there is less emphasis on the philosophy of humanities and ethics in the states and the UK. Some B.A programs in Europe have almost no logic components which would be unthinkable here. In the states Chomsky has influenced courses greatly and in the UK Russell/Wittgenstein have. Both of these ..or at least Chomsky and Wittgenstein came from other things Wittgenstein came from a maths background. They are logicians. It transposes into verbal philosophy. There is lacking of formal logic in European philosophy and a lot more touchy feely elements. The best you get is an analytically-reasoned argument and sometimes not even that. You would rarely get a European philosopher using theological test form for an argument eg a syllogism in a book to be published perhaps because it's going to be read more widely.

    There is a popular soft philosophy Alain de Bottain etc ....Derrida is not way off this and certainly in France philosopher have higher public profiles and less academic ones.


    zeffabelli wrote: »
    Thing is philosophy, like poetry has always pushed language, because it has to.

    But yes in my experience, the Frenchies are the worst for what you are talking about. Particularly French feminist marxists.....

    My dad used to say academics write like this because no one ever asked them to dance in high school. :)
    Philosophicallanguage is technical it's just based on definitions and phrases going back thousands of years really. It's like legal language etc. You have to learn the definitions. You have to understand also, reading Europeans in English is obviously a translation of that technical language.

    When I was in first year we had an Erasmus student from France. I was saying how I found Descartes clearer than someone Like Robert Boyle. And he pointed out it was because the archaic french was translated into modern English whereas Boyle is left in the archaic English of the sixteen hundreds.


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    #16
    zeffabelli
    Closed Accounts Posts: 2,516 ✭✭✭zeffabelli


    I don't know, ever read Whitehead and Leibniz?

    The process of reading it is no different from trying to read TS Elliot's Wasteland....

    The anglo tradition is linear and logic based, but logic can only take you so far.


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    #17
    LadyAthame
    Closed Accounts Posts: 793 ✭✭✭LadyAthame


    zeffabelli wrote: »
    I don't know, ever read Whitehead and Leibniz?

    The process of reading it is no different from trying to read TS Elliot's Wasteland....

    The anglo tradition is linear and logic based, but logic can only take you so far.
    Of Course! My degree was a pure major philosophy degree. Lol one of my first year essays was on Liebniz and his theory of monads! I had to go through that without laughing at the word monad. :-P I didn't find him that difficult to read.


    Do you know that both he and Newton Discovered Calculus at exactly roughly the same time independently of one another.

    http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdfs/leibniz1714b.pdf

    The monadology is clear to read. Forget about the god stuff he was a man of his time. Other stuff like the principle of contradiction and of sufficient reason is good. We establish necessary truths by deducing them using the principle of contradiction. The idea is that a truth is necessary if and only if negating it logically implies a contradiction. So every necessary truth can be proved by reductio ad absurdum or on other words assume that it's not true. Show that this assumption leads to a contradiction and that way you know your assumption was false.We know contingient truths only by sufficient reason we can deduce contingient truths only if we make certain assumptions.

    I find those principles interesting because Leibniz was also a practicing lawyer during his life. And he was interested in the philosophy of law. I find him legally minded. Or rather the rational part of law theory.

    Whitehead along with Wittgenstein was one of Bertrand Russell's main collaborators but mostly for math logic Principia Mathmatica Cobb does a good introduction to Whitehead if you want an aid.

    People are often offput by philosophical language. In first year one of the biggest books on our list was the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy it's twice the size of a telephone book. It's a subject that's very old and some terms are outright archaic. It's a technical language with words not used anywhere else and only used by philosophers because we use definitions and ideas not used usually elsewhere. You're not meant to be able to easily understand primary texts at first. I was reading it everyday for three years. I would say if you like reading philosophy that Dictionary would be useful you might get it in waterstones.


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    #18
    zeffabelli
    Closed Accounts Posts: 2,516 ✭✭✭zeffabelli


    LadyAthame wrote: »
    Of Course! My degree was a pure major philosophy degree. Lol one of my first year essays was on Liebniz and his theory of monads! I had to go through that without laughing at the word monad. :-P I didn't find him that difficult to read.


    Do you know that both he and Newton Discovered Calculus at exactly roughly the same time independently of one another.

    http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdfs/leibniz1714b.pdf

    The monadology is clear to read. Forget about the god stuff he was a man of his time. Other stuff like the principle of contradiction and of sufficient reason is good. We establish necessary truths by deducing them using the principle of contradiction. The idea is that a truth is necessary if and only if negating it logically implies a contradiction. So every necessary truth can be proved by reductio ad absurdum or on other words assume that it's not true. Show that this assumption leads to a contradiction and that way you know your assumption was false.We know contingient truths only by sufficient reason we can deduce contingient truths only if we make certain assumptions.

    I find those principles interesting because Leibniz was also a practicing lawyer during his life. And he was interested in the philosophy of law. I find him legally minded. Or rather the rational part of law theory.

    Whitehead along with Wittgenstein was one of Bertrand Russell's main collaborators but mostly for math logic Principia Mathmatica Cobb does a good introduction to Whitehead if you want an aid.

    People are often offput by philosophical language. In first year one of the biggest books on our list was the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy it's twice the size of a telephone book. It's a subject that's very old and some terms are outright archaic. It's a technical language with words not used anywhere else and only used by philosophers because we use definitions and ideas not used usually elsewhere. You're meant to be able to easily understand primary texts at first. I was reading it everyday for three years. I would say if you like reading philosophy that Dictionary would be useful you might get it in waterstones.

    This is what a lot of deconstruction comes down to...back to the Talmud also...the enshrinement of debate..destroy the axiom and you destroy the whole argument. It's also the problem with linear, vertical thinking.

    All diction is contradiction.

    I don't "enjoy" reading philosophy, I find it laborious. Like the Wasteland, where you also have to read The Golden Bough to know what the hell he is on about, if I need a four inch dictionary, the writer is not doing his job.

    I am not a lazy reader, and I know this, but there is only so much I am willing to put up with from demanding writers....which is why I made it through 8 pages of Finnegans {sic} Wake before deciding this is over-hyped ****.

    As far as reading Whitehead, I did my penance in college, but thanks.:) Yep I knew about Leibniz and Newton's synchronous discovery of Calculus.


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