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Not a method
Derrida states that “Deconstruction is not a method and cannot be transformed into one”. This is because deconstruction is not a mechanical operation. Derrida warns against considering deconstruction as a mechanical operation when he states that “It is true that in certain circles (university or cultural, especially in the United States) the technical and methodological “metaphor” that seems necessarily attached to the very word “deconstruction” has been able to seduce or lead astray”. Commentator Richard Beardsworth explains that
Derrida is careful to avoid this term [method] because it carries connotations of a procedural form of judgement. A thinker with a method has already decided how to proceed, is unable to give him or herself up to the matter of thought in hand, is a functionary of the criteria which structure his or her conceptual gestures. For Derrida [...] this is irresponsibility itself. Thus, to talk of a method in relation to deconstruction, especially regarding its ethico-political implications, would appear to go directly against the current of Derrida's philosophical adventure.
Beardsworth here explains that it would be irresponsible to undertake a deconstruction with a complete set of rules that need only be applied as a method to the object of deconstruction because this understanding would reduce deconstruction to a thesis of the reader that the text is then made to fit. This would be an irresponsible act of reading because it ignores the empirical facticity of the text itself - that is it becomes a prejudicial procedure that that only finds what it sets out to find. To be responsible a deconstruction must carefully negotiate the empirical facticity of the text and hence respond to it. Deconstruction is not a method and this means that it is not a neat set of rules that can be applied to any text in the same way. Deconstruction is therefore not neatly transcendental because it cannot be considered separate from the contingent empirical facticity of the particular texts that any deconstruction must carefully negotiate. Each deconstruction is necessarily different (otherwise it achieves no work) and this is why Derrida states that “Deconstruction takes place, it is an event”. On the other hand deconstruction cannot be completely untranscendental because this would make it meaningless to, for example, speak of two different examples of deconstruction as both being examples of deconstruction. It is for this reason that Richard Rorty asks if Derrida should be considered a quasi-transcendental philosopher that operates in the tension between the demands of the empirical and the transcendental. Each example of deconstruction must be different but it must also share something with other examples of deconstruction. Deconstruction is therefore not a method in the traditional sense but is what Derrida terms "an unclosed, unenclosable, not wholly formalizable ensemble of rules for reading, interpretation and writing."
Derrida's negative descriptions
Derrida's negative descriptions
Derrida has been more forthcoming with negative than positive descriptions of deconstruction. Derrida gives these negative descriptions of deconstruction in order to explain "what deconstruction is not, or rather ought not to be" and therefore to prevent misunderstandings of the term. Derrida states that deconstruction is not an analysis, a critique, or a method. This means that Derrida does not want deconstruction to be misunderstood as an analysis, a critique, or a method in the traditional sense that philosophy understands these terms. In these negative descriptions of deconstruction Derrida is seeking to "multiply the cautionary indicators and put aside all the traditional philosophical concepts". This does not mean that deconstruction has absolutely nothing in common with an analysis, a critique, or a method because while Derrida distances deconstruction from these terms, he reaffirms "the necessity of returning to them, at least under erasure". Derrida's necessity of returning to a term under erasure means that even though these terms are problematic we must use them until they can be effectively reformulated or replaced. Derrida's thought developed in relation to Husserl's and this return to something under erasure has a similarity to Husserl's phenomenological reduction or epoché. Derrida acknowledges that his preference for negative description “has been called...a type of negative theology”. The relevance of the tradition of negative theology to Derrida's preference for negative descriptions of deconstruction is the notion that a positive description of deconstruction would over-determine the idea of deconstruction and that this would be a mistake because it would close off the openness that Derrida wishes to preserve for deconstruction. This means that if Derrida were to positively define deconstruction as, for example, a critique then this would put the concept of critique for ever outside the possibility of deconstruction. Some new philosophy beyond deconstruction would then be required in order to surpass the notion of critique. By refusing to define deconstruction positively Derrida preserves the infinite possibility of deconstruction, the possibility for the deconstruction of everything.
Différance
Considered more technically, deconstruction refers for Derrida to the problematisation of the metaphysical appeal to presence through différance. Derrida states that:
To "deconstruct" philosophy [...] would be to think - in the most faithful, interior way - the structured genealogy of philosophy's concepts, but at the same time to determine - from a certain exterior [...] - what this history has been able to dissimulate or forbid [...] By means of this simultaneously faithful and violent circulation between the inside and the outside of philosophy [...a] putting into question the meaning of Being as presence
To deconstruct philosophy is therefore to think carefully within philosophy about philosophical concepts in terms of their structure and genesis. Deconstruction tries to understand the implications of this history of philosophy as if we could reflect upon it from the outside. Especially the implications of the history of philosophy that have been least obvious because they have controlled the operation of all philosophical thought. Deconstruction operates both faithfully within philosophy and violently tries to escape it to some degree in order to understand it better. Deconstruction does this in order to challenge the basic controlling operation of all philosophical thought: the meaning of being as presence. For Derrida all philosophy is metaphysics - a philosophy of being. Derrida argues that all theories of knowledge are metaphysical appeals to the full presence of truth in a given situation. This is regardless of how the criteria advocated by different epistemologies is constructed. Deconstruction questions this appeal to presence by arguing that there is always an irreducible aspect of non-presence in operation. Derrida terms this aspect of non-presence différance. Différance is therefore the key theoretical basis of deconstruction. Deconstruction questions the the basic operation of all philosophy through the appeal to presence and différance therefore pervades all philosophy. Derrida argues that différance pervades all philosophy because "What defers presence [...] is the very basis on which presence is announced or desired in what represents it, its sign, its trace". Différance therefore pervades all philosophy because all philosophy is constructed as a system through language. Différance is essential to language because it produces "what metaphysics calls the sign (signified/signifier)". In one sense, a sign must point to something beyond itself that is its meaning so the sign is never fully present in itself but a deferral to something else, to something different. In another sense the structural relationship between the signified and signifier, as two related but separate aspects of the sign, is produced through differentiation. Derrida states that différance "is the economical concept", meaning that it is the concept of all systems and structures, because "there is no economy without différance [...] the movement of différance, as that which produces different things, that which differentiates, is the common root of all the oppositional concepts that mark our language [...] différance is also the production [...] of these differences." Différance is therefore the condition of possibility for all complex systems and hence all philosophy. Operating through différance, deconstruction is the description of how non-presence problematises the operation of the appeal to presence within a particular philosophical system. Différance is an a-priori condition of possibility that is always already in effect but a deconstruction must be a careful description of how this différance is actually in effect in a given text. A deconstruction is achieved through recreating the full force of Derrida's deconstruction of Husserl in Speech and Phenomena and cannot simply derive its legitimacy from an appeal to Derrida's work and then be applied as a methodology. The effectiveness of Derrida's general strategy must be creatively reworked in response to the object text under consideration. All deconstructions are different and cannot be assumed before the deconstruction has actually been demonstrated - but, somewhat paradoxically, all deconstructions must describe problems that once made clear can be said to have always have been in effect in an unrecognised manner. Deconstruction therefore describes problems in the text rather than creating them (which would be trivial). Derrida considers the illustration of aporia in this way to be productive because it shows the failure of earlier philosophical systems and the necessity of continuing to philosophise through them with deconstruction.
Theory
The eagerness to appropriate deconstruction to literary criticism has lead to an emphasis on how Derrida's usage of the term deconstruction changes the understanding of language and how this affects the reading or interpretation of the text. Derrida's development of the term deconstruction in both Of Grammatology and Speech and Phenomena focusses on problematising the appeal to presence as it occurs in the historical privileging of speech over writing and in phenomenology. This appeal to presence takes the form of an appeal to the full self presence of meaning in the consciousness of the speaking or phenomenological subject. An implication of this argument challenging this form of the appeal to presence - if one is to assume its success (making this assumption without consideration of the actual arguments involved is the most common way that advocates of deconstruction get it wrong) - is that language users can no longer be considered fully in control of the meaning of the language they use. Language could therefore be said to have its own force and it should be possible to demonstrate how the language that is used resists the use to which it is put or, more simply, that the writer cannot neatly mean what they intend to mean. The empirical facticity of the text, the use of certain words or certain passages in the text, can be demonstrated to resist or contradict the meaning the author - or canonical interpretation - intends for the text as a whole. It is this emphasis on the hermeneutical implications of deconstruction that leads to its most common usage. A deconstruction therefore describes the failure of the appeal to presence within the text. In literary criticism this is taken as the failure of the text to mean what its author intended it to mean. For Derrida the description of this failure must be demonstrated with painstaking rigour in any particular text by paying close attention to the details of the text in relation to the intentions of the author in order for one to be able to say that the text has been deconstructed.
Husserl
Edmund Husserl is one of the major influences on the development of Derrida's philosophy. Derrida's earliest work is concerned with the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Derrida's first publication and masters project was a book-length Introduction to his translation from German into French of Husserl's The Origin of Geometry. Husserl's understanding of the necessity and problems associated with the demands for both genetic and structural description is the topic of Derrida's very early essay "'Genesis and Structure' and Phenomenology" and key to understanding the development of deconstruction. Derrida's first book length deconstruction is Speech and Phenomena in which Derrida critically engages with Husserl's philosophy. Husserl is therefore both mentor and foil to the development of deconstruction. In Derrida's first published paper titled "'Genesis and Structure' and Phenomenology" (1959) Derrida describes "two polemics which placed him [Husserl] in opposition to those philosophies of structure called Diltheyism and Gestaltism". These two polemics by Husserl are forerunners of Derrida's own deconstruction and Husserl demonstrates in them the philosophical movement of deconstruction that Derrida makes his own. Derrida derives his initial understanding of the necessity for structural thought and its inherent problems from Husserl, noting admiringly that Husserl "ceaselessly attempts to reconcile the structuralist demand (which leads to the comprehensive description of a totality, of a form or a function organized according to an internal legality in which elements have meaning only in the solidarity of their correlation or their opposition), with the genetic demand (that is the search for the origin and foundation of the structure)". Derrida refers to this tension between the incompatible but equally necessary demands of origin and structure as the "structural problematic" and it is within this tension that deconstruction operates - raising questions of origin when confronted with structures and questions of structure when confronted with origins. Derrida explains that "the objectivity of a structure ... is tied to the concrete genesis which must make it possible" and that "Husserl refuses, and will always refuse, to accept the intelligibility and normativity of this universal structure as manna fallen from a "heavenly place" ... or as an eternal truth created by an infinite reason". This means that even the most sophisticated and convincing system of thought is vulnerable to questions of how this system of thought was constructed. Deconstruction therefore ambitiously challenges ways of thinking that are often considered most objective by asking how they came to be attributed the status of objectivity
Precursors
Deconstruction emerged from a clearly delineated philosophical context:
* Derrida's earliest work is concerned with the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Derrida's first publication and masters project was a book-length Introduction to his translation from German into French of Husserl's The Origin of Geometry. Husserl's understanding of the necessity and problems associated with the demands for both genetic and structural description is the topic of Derrida's very early essay "'Genesis and Structure' and Phenomenology" and key to understanding the development of deconstruction. Derrida's first book length deconstruction is Speech and Phenomena in which Derrida critically engages with Husserl's philosophy.
* Martin Heidegger, was one of the most significant influences on Derrida's thought: Derrida's Of Spirit deals directly with Heidegger, but Heidegger's influence on deconstruction is much broader than that one volume. Heidegger's crucial influence on deconstruction is that he "defines being itself as a question". Derrida states that deconstruction is the questioning of "the meaning of Being as presence" and it therefore operates closely with Heidegger's thought by insisting on the questioning of being.
* The psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan are important reference points in the development of deconstruction: The Post Card, important essays in Writing and Difference, Archive Fever, and many other deconstructive works deal primarily with Freud.
* The work of Friedrich Nietzsche is alleged to be a forerunner of deconstruction in form and substance, as Derrida writes in Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles.
* In Of Grammatology, Derrida makes clear that the work of André Leroi-Gourhan is important to the formulation of deconstruction and grammatology. Not only does Derrida refer the thought of grammè to Leroi-Gourhan's use of the concepts of "exteriorization" and "program," but he also makes use of Leroi-Gourhan's understanding of life and of human life to formulate his own concept of writing. Leroi-Gourhan, according to Derrida, makes it possible to think the history of life as the history of the grammè, and in this context Derrida states that life—in the sense of the great evolving movement of the inscription of difference in which the history of life consists—is "what I have called différance."
* The structuralism of Ferdinand de Saussure, and other forms of post-structuralism that evolved contemporaneously with deconstruction (such as the work of Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, etc.), were the immediate intellectual climate for the formation of deconstruction. In many cases, these authors were close friends, colleagues, or correspondents of Derrida's.
* Hegels understanding of the absolute that also includes the negation of itself (because otherwise it would not be the all encompassing absolute) is a forerunner of the presence of non-presence within presence that a deconstruction must demonstrate to be in operation. Derrida also defines the term différance - the key theoretical basis of deconstruction - as "the limit, the interruption, the destruction of the Hegelian relève wherever it operates" Meaning that différance is the frustration of the perfect operation of the Hegelian sublation that prevents it from overwriting the previous moment absolutely. Différance preserves a trace of that which went before
HISTORY
Derrida first uses the term deconstruction in Of Grammatology in 1967 to describe the implications of understanding language as writing and how this leads to the impossibility of a straightforward theory of intentional meaning. Derrida states that when he first used the term deconstruction he "wished to translate and adapt to my own ends the Heidggerian word Destruktion or Abbau". Heidegger's philosophy developed in relation to Husserl's and Derrida's use of the term deconstruction is closely linked to Derrida's own appropriation of Husserl's understanding of the necessity and problems associated with structural description. Deconstruction has links to the tradition of immanent critique in which the problems already operating within a discourse are demonstrated. As deconstruction is based in the conclusion of Derrida's arguments against intentional meaning in Of Grammatology and Speech and Phenomena there is some crossover with hermeneutics in that a given example of deconstruction may appeal to older historical meanings of terminology in order to demonstrate a real layer of meaning that is present in the text but runs contrary to what the author wants to use that terminology to mean
DECONSTRUCTION
From about 1963 to 1968, he tried to work out - in particular in the three works published in 1967 - what was in no way meant to be a system but rather a sort of strategic device, opening its own abyss, an unclosed, unenclosable, not wholly formalizable ensemble of rules for reading, interpretation and writing. This type of device may have enabled me to detect not only in the history of philosophy and in the related socio-historical totality, but also in what are alleged to be sciences and in so-called post-philosophical discourses that figure among the most modern (in linguistics, in anthropology, in psychoanalysis), to detect in these an evaluation of writing, or, to tell the truth, rather a devaluation of writing whose insistent, repetitive, even obscurely compulsive, character was the sign of a whole set of long-standing constraints. These constraints were practised at the price of contradictions, of denials, of dogmatic decrees"
The technical difficulty of the primary material by Derrida on deconstruction and the eager appropriation of the term by people who did not always have a clear understanding of Derrida's usage of the term has lead to considerable confusion in its reception. In response Derrida clarified the situation by clearly stating what deconstruction is not. The most important of Derrida's qualifications of the term is that deconstruction is not poststructural and deconstruction is not a methodology in the traditional sense. Derrida avoided offering a reductive definition of deconstruction that he felt would necessarily oversimplify the complex and technical role of the term in his own philosophy - he insists that to understand the term properly you have to "do your homework" and read the relevant texts involved - but many secondary texts have risked offering their own interpretive definitions. Today the term deconstruction is popular far beyond Derrida's own usage of it and is most closely associated with continental philosophy and literary criticism. Paul de Man is a prominent practitioner of his own interpretation of deconstruction and the most famous member of what came to be referred to as the Yale School of deconstruction.
Exploring the Possibilites of Form
The theory of dispersal comes to fruition in House X. Where in previous
houses Eisenman worked with the object as a signifier, this project attempts to
operate under the philosophy that the only understandable aspects of the house are
a “system of differences” experienced directly by its participants but simultaneously
almost impossible to decipher. This reinforces the philosophy that the building is
an indeterminate system in constant flux, stopped at one moment in its evolution.
Roalind Krauss states about House X,
One encounters [dispersal] within the room with transparent floors and
ceilings and opaque walls…The space in which the viewer finds himself
is, then, one whose perspectives run vertically and diagonally through
the system of the house rather than horizontally…the occupant is
forced to view the space as a linked set of opposing terms, to
encounter the “room” less as an entity than as one part of a system of
differences.”
With the end of the House series came Eisenman’s first opportunities to apply
the theories he had developed throughout the building downturn of the 1970’s to
larger scale projects. In 1980 he established a professional practice in New York,
Eisenman Architects, to focus exclusively on building.Critics questioned whether
Eisenman’s approach, which essentially ignored program and context, could work on
a larger scale. In Philip Johnson’s book Five Architects, Philip Johnson posed the
question of Peter Eisenman, ‘What would he do in a large building?” To answer
this question, one must jump ahead to Ohio State University’s Wexner Center for the
Visual Arts.
For Wexner Center, Eisenman incorporated both old and new theories into its
design, bringing issues of the diagram as generator, the grid, trace, and dispersal
with him from past projects to bring about a displacement, but also considering new
aspects such as context and program. R.E. Somol provides an explanation as to why
Eisenman would do an about face from his previous stance regarding program and
context.
references: Eisenman, Peter. House of Cards. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987