I sympathize with the author's desire to make fun of that which he doesn't understand, but ultimately, it's a shallow game.
C'mon, this is Hacker News, we don't say "This is wrong, but I won't tell you why" here. For what it's worth, I'd actually like to hear your perspective if you take the time.
The article provided a coherent explanation of deconstruction that jives with what my eyes see, which makes it the best thing I've seen on the topic. But if you see holes in it, why not take the time to point them out? I'd like to understand more since this style of academia seems to be influential in universities these days.
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?
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.
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.
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.)
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'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.
If it doesn't have a method or a formula, could you instead tell us what deconstruction is? How can I tell it from a best-seller or the output of a Markov text generator?
Could you simply point out the most outrageous error in the text? Or just an outrageous error?
> I sympathize with the author's desire to make fun of that which he doesn't understand, but ultimately, it's a shallow game.
I reject your attempt to belittle the author by suggesting they are shallow. Your response is fallacious (telling us there are errors without pointing out what they are, ad hominem against the author) and, in claiming to "sympathise" with the author's supposed "desire to make fun", snobbish.
I try to be as civil on the internet as I am in real life. IRL, I'd say "Stop sneering and tell us something useful, or go away."
Here are a few outrageous errors, taken at random: "Deconstruction, in particular, is a fairly formulaic process" "points are awarded on the basis of style and wit rather than substance," "Decide what the text says. This can be whatever you want,"
I try to be as civil on the internet as I am in real life. IRL, I'd say "Stop sneering and tell us something useful, or go away."
The useful something I would tell you is: don't assume that people making fun of something actually understand what that something is. Furthermore, don't assume that just because something can't be easily explained in a blog post, it is nonsense. And finally, don't be surprised when people who take a complex discipline seriously are reluctant to engage with dismissive outsiders with an axe to grind and no real desire to engage. (My brother-in-law is a professor of Shakespeare at Cambridge, and you should see the look on his face when someone at a cocktail party raises the "authorship" issue...)
Would you also consider Noam Chomsky (I refer to the link posted within this thread) to be a "dismissive outsiders with an axe to grind and no real desire to engage"? Could it be possible that they are reluctant to engage within anyone who questions their assertions?
Many times I've encountered people who seem to use techniques described in the article when trying to discuss social issues, and in my experience at least, when you ask them to explain what they have just said in a prior statement, the usual response is a change of subject, even though I am genuinely interested in understanding their point of view. They are more than happy to continue the conversation as long as it consists of them continually making assertions in obtuse language, and casually deflecting questions by changing the subject, but the moment you insist they explain something they just said, the conversation usually ends. In my experiences, anyways.
As interesting as I find the subject, I think Chomsky's got the right idea: "End of Reply, and (to be frank) of my personal interest in the matter, unless the obvious questions are answered."
when you ask them to explain what they have just said in a prior statement, the usual response is a change of subject, even though I am genuinely interested in understanding their point of view
This is quite understandable, I'm afraid. Trying to explain Heidegger to someone who hasn't read Kant is a very difficult game indeed. If you're genuinely interested in learning the more elevated parts of a discipline, you need to put in some time on the basics.
> "points are awarded on the basis of style and wit rather than substance,"
This is a cheap shot, and is mostly about style and wit, rather than substance. But is it possible that writing in a more obtuse manner is rewarded within academic circles, which I believe is the argument actually being made?
> "Decide what the text says. This can be whatever you want,"
Again, this is cheap, and I guess is also a shot at post-modernism in general. From the author's and your comments, I guess it should have been "Choose an accepted, face-value interpretation of the text."
> "Deconstruction, in particular, is a fairly formulaic process"
But here I don't see your argument. From your other posting, Derrida then goes through the entire Platonic corpus, and quotes every time the word "pharmakon" certainly sounds formulaic. You also say 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. That sounds formulaic, so it what sense is it a bad description of deconstruction?
If deconstruction is not a formula for lit crit, what is it? Deconstruction can't be the philosophy of Derrida. Well, it can be, but the obvious question is then, what is the philosophy of Derrida? I think this is the core issue. If the philosophy cannot be explained to an outsider, then to what extent is it a real thing, and to what extent is the collective hallucination of the in-group?
> don't assume that people making fun of something actually understand what that something is.
I should like to apologise and take back my comment that you were sneering. It was rude, and as it turns out, untrue. You genuinely believe the author is trying to make fun of the philosophy, but I don't think he is. He has read the books and thinks he can explain what deconstruction is. He takes a somewhat dim view of it to be sure, but that doesn't mean he doesn't understand it or that he wants to make fun of it.
> don't assume that just because something can't be easily explained in a blog post, it is nonsense.
See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1490304 for Chomsky's comments on this. (Basically, no-one has explained it to me yet, and I don't get it, and I'm damm smart, so it's either way over my head, and therefore very smart indeed, or bunk.)
> don't be surprised when people who take a complex discipline seriously are reluctant to engage with dismissive outsiders with an axe to grind and no real desire to engage. (My brother-in-law is a professor of Shakespeare at Cambridge, and you should see the look on his face when someone at a cocktail party raises the "authorship" issue...)
I am in no way dismissive of philosophy and my axe is sharp enough. As I see it, in this case the insiders are dismissive of the outsiders -- "you have to read all these works to even understand what we are talking about, and we might still say you are not in the in-group and you are just trying to make fun of us." Given that, it is hardly surprising when outsiders are dismissive of you.
Well, we certainly disagree there. I don't think the piece was written as a good-faith attempt to explain deconstruction, but rather, as an attempt to ridicule and dismiss it, for the most part.
But is it possible that writing in a more obtuse manner is rewarded within academic circles, which I believe is the argument actually being made?
It's possible, but not accurate. Philosophers are not obscure just for the hell of it, any more than physicists are. And any outliers who are perceived as being needlessly obscure are not rewarded for this-- quite the contrary.
From the author's and your comments, I guess it should have been "Choose an accepted, face-value interpretation of the text."
Actually, we don't "choose" the interpretation at all when we read a text.
But here I don't see your argument. From your other posting, Derrida then goes through the entire Platonic corpus, and quotes every time the word "pharmakon" certainly sounds formulaic. Is it's not a formula for lit crit, what is it?
This is indeed the crux of the biscuit. The fact that (in his reading of the Phaedrus) Derrida quoted every time the word "pharmakon" came up does not make this a general formula to be applied to every other text. In fact, I can't think of another example where Derrida did something similar to another text (i.e., pulling out all of the instances of a particular word in an author's corpus.)
In other words: the way that Derrida read the Phaedrus is not a model for how one should read another text.
What is noteworthy is that Derrida found the tools for reading the Phaedrus within the Phaedrus itself; he did not apply some outside formula to the text.
If the philosophy cannot be explained to an outsider, then to what extent is it a real thing, and to what extent is the collective hallucination of the in-group?
It can be explained to an outsider, if that outsider has the necessary background and patience. You wouldn't expect to be able to explain a proposed proof of the Riemann Hypothesis to someone who didn't know algebra, would you?
In order to properly understand Derrida's philosophy, you need a solid understanding of the philosophies of Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel, Freud, Nietzsche and Levinas. (Derrida admits as much in one of his notable early works.) I promise you that to anyone who has that background, Derrida will be perfectly understandable.
(Basically, no-one has explained it to me yet, and I don't get it, and I'm damm smart, so it's either way over my head, and therefore very smart indeed, or bunk.)
That is an adequate representation of Chomsky's view. Unfortunately, it's a category error. Chomsky is indeed, very smart. That doesn't mean that he should expect his genius to transfer to disciplines outside his own. If Chomsky had the patience (and inclination) to adequately study Continental Philosophy, I guarantee he'd be able to understand it in a year or two of study. The fact that he's not interested in doing so, and that no-one else is willing to try to spoon-feed it to him is no reflection on the discipline itself.
As I see it, in this case the insiders are dismissive of the outsiders -- "you have to read all these works to even understand what we are talking about, and we might still say you are not in the in-group and you are just trying to make fun of us." Given that, it is hardly surprising when outsiders are dismissive of you.
I wasn't referring to you, I was referring to the author of the piece, who certainly is dismissive of deconstruction, and seems to have an axe to grind. Furthermore, the pseudo-quote you offer is a canard: this is what all disciplines do. And, in fact, Derrida has a nice interview on the subject on "The Ethics of Discussion", which states that the sine qua non for any ethics of discussion is to actually read the work one is criticizing. You wouldn't trust a film critic who didn't see the film, right? So, why is it so much to ask that someone actually read a philosopher (and the prerequisites he relies upon) before dismissing him?
> So, why is it so much to ask that someone actually read a philosopher (and the prerequisites he relies upon) before dismissing him?
It is indeed not too much to ask. However, if a pure scientist says to me, "I can't explain it, but we're discovering something we think is interesting," I have more faith in her than a philosopher saying much the same thing, and I'm more happy for e.g. the government to fund her research and not the philosopher's. Is that wrong?
I find Derrida to be a fascinating philosopher for several reasons. One, his thought has a profoundly ethical component (influenced by Levinas). Second, he questions many of the assumptions that other philosophers have taken for granted (in a way similar to Nietzsche). Third, he has a very subtle phenomenology which I personally find very compelling (i.e., it seems to aid my understanding of the world.)
Of course, your mileage may vary.
However, if a pure scientist says to me, "I can't explain it, but we're discovering something we think is interesting," I have more faith in her than a philosopher saying much the same thing, and I'm more happy for e.g. the government to fund her research and not the philosopher's. Is that wrong?
Obligatory joke-- College president, to the head of the physics department: "Why do you need such a big budget for equipment? Why can't you be like the mathematics department? all they ask for are pencils and wastebaskets. Or, better yet, like the philosophy department-- all they ask for are pencils..."
If I already perceived half of those guys as going in the wrong direction entirely, is there any value to reading what is essentially a commentary on them?
I must say, a long exposure to the analytic tradition has, to me, evaporated all these excuses. When you're saying something about morality or the nature of knowledge, you can state it directly, even at the risk of restating some elements that others have stated. This is true even if you're directly responding to them (in which case you restate the points you are responding to). The main prerequisite is a training in logic, simply because many statements in analytic philosophy are most clearly expressed in variously-formal logical forms.
On the other hand, if you're only offering a commentary on past philosophers, perhaps some novel technique of reading their texts (which, judging by your posts, seems to be Derrida's primary innovation) is enough of an innovation.
I think Derrida would've been much better off, in terms of intellectual legacy, if he had a student who took him somewhat less seriously on that point, perhaps even against his wishes. Say, someone who was willing to write even a fairly difficult and technical book, but in straightforward, fairly clear prose, attempting to explain at least a version of the main ideas Derrida's works dealt with. Instead, he got people who sort of pushed him in the opposite direction, Derrideans whose prose was somehow even "more Derridean" than his own, and who didn't really do much as far as explaining his ideas to anyone who didn't already buy them. Put differently, what difficult but possibly brilliant thinkers need are clear and convincing expositors, not also-difficult-yet-mediocre imitators.
You want to know the funny thing? He did exactly that.
One of Derrida's most prominent students, Geoff Bennington, wrote a book (with Derrida's approval and authorization) which attempted to summarize Derrida's work for the general reader. To make the game more interesting, he attempted to do so without directly quoting Derrida a single time. And, just to put a nice bow on it all, Derrida read the manuscript, and wrote a piece (which is published in the same volume) outlining briefly the parts of his philosophy he thought were excluded by Bennington's summary.
Trying to read Derrida on, say, Condillac, is absolutely pointless if you haven't read the Condillac.
Fortunately, in the course of his career, Derrida read through a large swath of the philosophical corpus, so it should be pretty easy to find a work of his which comments on something you already know well.
If you can't explain something, you don't understand it. If no-one can explain it, no-one understands it and it doesn't mean anything. A theory with no predictive power is useless.
(As an aside, I had a look at some of Geoff Bennington's other freely accessible work and came across the gem "The end of communication is the end of communication." That's a clever pun, but was it really the best way to explain an obtuse philosophy that others regard as simply an edifice of clever puns and tricks, void of thought? Ballsy, but surely not the best way. Has anyone explained Derrida using words of four letters or less, without a single pun?)
I am wasting too much of my time, and yours, so my parting shot shall be this: Is there any point attempting to understand this philosophy? Will it make me a better person? Will it enable me to organise society better? Will it help me understand the universe more fully? Or will it simply mean I can count myself part of an in-group that has no discernible external beliefs?
And, then, of course, he goes on to do the impossible. This notion of "the impossible" is, in itself, a key concept in Derrida's thought, but we're getting ahead of ourselves.
If you can't explain something, you don't understand it. If no-one can explain it, no-one understands it and it doesn't mean anything. A theory with no predictive power is useless.
I can explain it. Geoff Bennington can explain it. However: you have to meet us partway. You have to read the whole damn book, not just the Amazon previews.
Seriously: is that too much to ask?
Has anyone explained Derrida using words of four letters or less, without a single pun?)
Has anybody explained Kant, or Einstein, or Descartes or Newton or any other difficult thinker in words of four letters or less?
Is there any point attempting to understand this philosophy?
Yes.
Will it make me a better person?
Yes, in my experience. (It is largely about ethics, believe it or not.)
Will it enable me to organise society better?
To a certain extent, yes. And it will better help you understand why certain efforts to organise society are doomed to fail.
Will it help me understand the universe more fully?
Yes, definitely.
Or will it simply mean I can count myself part of an in-group that has no discernible external beliefs?
It has discernible external beliefs, I'm afraid. I hope that's not a deal-breaker for you.
http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/txt/al.html -- Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity (In Words of Four Letters or Less)
On the basis of your answers I shall read the Bennington suggested, but I must admit I'm not optimistic. Discernible external beliefs are not a deal-breaker; they are the point of the deal.
I would like to conclude there (feel free to have the last word; that is not an attempt to cut off the discussion on my terms, but merely to get on with some work :-) You have been somewhat persuasive and very civil in the face of my disagreement, thank you. Thank you also for your time, I owe you a beer/coffee (and by then maybe I can have done the reading and we can talk properly.)
If not, the Bennington isn't going to be of much use.
Derrida situates himself within a particular tradition; it's (necessarily) hard to read him in isolation.
Four letters? No. Not even this sentence has only words of four letters or less.
However many major contributions of Newton, Descartes, and Einstein to mathematics and science have been broken down and simplified until they both can be and are routinely taught to high school students. Seriously, when I graduated from grade 12 I understood the basic coordinate system (Descartes), simple Calculus (Newton), conservation of momentum (Newton again), the Newtonian theory of gravity (Newton again) and the Special Theory of Relativity (Einstein).
Furthermore if you pick up The Feynman Lectures on Physics you will find understandable expositions of all of these, and plenty more. All are covered, along with a great many other things, in the first half of the first book alone. Often a major concept, such as basic Calculus, is explained in just a few pages.
Given that that's what scientists tend to do with their theories, are you surprised that they would look for something similar with other people's theories?