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Deconstructing Deconstructionism
By Robert Locke
FrontPageMagazine.com | November 28, 2001
"The students at
Tianamen Square have Deng Xiao-Ping to deconstruct their statue of
liberty. They do not need Western intellectuals to do it for them."
–Allan Bloom
ONE OF THE GREAT ASSETS
of the academic left is its ability to invent and teach a
synthesis, a systematic
distillation of leftism into a convenient package. Once mastered,
this synthesis
can be relied upon to give the adherent a left-wing analysis of
anything from
Strategic Missile Defense to poetry. Marxism once fulfilled this
role for a
great many, but for the past 15 years or so, the ascendant school of sophistry
has been deconstructionism. So it’s worth getting a grip on how this philosophical
con-game works and why it’s false.
Deconstructionism originally
came from France in the ‘70s. It is also known as poststructuralism, but don’t
ask what structuralism was, as it was no better. It is based on the proposition
that the apparently real world is in fact a vast social construct and that the
way to knowledge lies in taking apart in one’s mind this thing society has built.
Taken to its logical conclusion, it supposes that there is at the end of the
day no actual reality, just a series of appearances stitched together by social
constructs into what we all agree to call reality. But not agree voluntarily,
for society has (this is the leftist bit) an oppressive structure, so we are
pressured to agree to that version of reality which pleases the people in charge.
(If you specialize in studying this pressure, you are a member of the Michel
Foucault school of deconstructionism.)
One of the clearest signs
that deconstructionism is a con is that it is invariably expressed in the most
complicated possible language, not the clearest, a sure sign that the writer
is trying to sound clever rather than convey information. The summary I have
just given would take months to extract from the average deconstructionist.
The effort required to glean the actual meaning from their spaghetti tangles of
run-on sentences, larded with a standard repertoire of tortured constructions
and verbal tics, is a kind of hazing ritual required for initiation into the
deconstructionist illuminati.
They have a number of these
standard verbal tics by which they can be recognized. Gratuitous plurals are
one, as in "homosexualities," a favorite term intended to convey the
great insight that not all homosexuals are alike. But not even Jerry Falwell
thinks this! When I saw the home decorating section of the New York Times Sunday
Magazine headlined "domesticities" a few months ago, I knew for sure
that some deconstructionist young pup had finally made it to the editorial chair.
The deconstructionist account
differs from the Marxist one in that, while Marx believed that what we think
is a product of our role in the economic system, deconstructionism prides itself
on recognizing that there are lots of other systems besides economics forcing
us to think this way and that. But in practice, it is very easy to write
deconstructionist
analysis that just harps on the economic angle, so much of deconstructionism
is just cultural Marxism. Cultural Marxism (what Tom Wolfe calls Rococo Marxism) is
to be distinguished from ordinary Marxism, which is about revolutions
and socialism and boring things like that. Cultural Marxism is way too cool
for that. It is popular with hip young academics who have read Solzhenitsyn,
seen the Berlin Wall come down, like shopping at Crate & Barrel, but still
want a philosophy that will distance them from bourgeois society and all those
tasteless squares. (The sight of Marxists worrying about tastelessness would
have reduced Lenin to a fit of giggles, but that’s another issue.) Cultural
Marxism enables one to simultaneously sneer at popular culture, satisfying one’s
elitist impulses, while taking a populist attitude towards it, because pop culture
isn’t the fault of the populace but of the Big Bad Bourgeoisie, or in a more
sophisticated formulation, of the system of which the BBB is the leading element.
So Marxism tends to be a toy that deconstructionists pick up and put down at
will. (If you emphasize the way in which the system has a mind of its own that
is bigger than the BBB who run it, you are a member of the Hardt-Negri school, as
epitomized by their wildly popular new book Empire.)
You may wonder how left-wing
all this is, if these people are busy critiquing our consciousness of reality
rather than trying to overthrow the state or achieve equality. In fact, some
deconstructionists are apolitical, and serious leftists have been known to complain
about this. They accuse the deconstructionists of playing abstract intellectual
games while there is revolutionary work to be done. Intelligent leftists like
Alan Sokal, a card-carrying Sandalista physicist at New York University, have
belligerently attacked deconstructionism because it leads, if taken seriously,
to the conclusion that leftism is just another social construct to be deconstructed.
It seems leftist to start with, but it eventually devours itself. The
deconstructionists
ran afoul of him by straying into what can only be described as the literary
criticism of physics, an endeavor which ended up making physics as much a rat’s
nest of opinion as the most gaseous poetry criticism. He got a parody of
deconstructionist analysis, "The Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," published in a
deconstructionist
magazine, Social Text, without telling them it was a parody just to prove
how stupid this all is.
Deconstructionism is obsessed
with finding contradictions in our socially-constructed picture of reality. It takes
these contradictions as proving that reality is a social construct,
because if our picture were actually true, it wouldn’t contradict. (Marxists
say that contradictions in the organization of our economic system produce these
contradictions in our thinking and that the process of working out these economic
contradictions will eventually work out the intellectual ones.) Deconstructionists
who devote themselves to ferreting out how deeply these philosophical wrinkles
are embedded in the structures of thought belong to the Jacques Derrida school.
Martin Heidegger (a Nazi party member and author of books with titles like What
is a Thing?) makes his appearance here as the grandmaster of ferreting out
deep metaphysical contradictions in our structures of thought.
All this make you dizzy?
It’s supposed to. Deconstructionists believe in something called the decentered
subject, which is basically what you get when you treat the human self as just
another social construct. Try thinking about yourself this way. See what I mean?
Deconstructionists think
that they are the first people in the history of the world to see things correctly.
But they aren’t even the first people to see things the way they see them. The
Greek sophists that Plato jousted with 2,500 years ago held essentially their
views; see Plato’s dialogue Gorgias. Michel Foucault (the bald Frenchman
who died of AIDS) thought he was the first person to figure out that social
order is maintained not just through "hard" coercion like the police
but through an intricate web of "soft" coercions that make us behave
through the pressures of conformity and culture. But does any precocious eighth
grader not grasp this intuitively?
The central trick, the
key sleight-of-hand, that makes deconstructionism plausible enough to fool people
into believing it is this: gather up all the attributes of reality that are
confusing, uncertain, controversial, or paradoxical, and claim that all of reality
is this way. But the existence of gray areas does not refute the existence of
black and white. Most of reality is very solid, even if there are margins that
are not.
Deconstructionism’s love
of social constructionism creates a disdain for nature. Deconstructionists have
a notoriously nerdy (this is really what it is, sorry) view of sex because they
are obliged to insist that all social differences are social conventions with
no basis in nature. I have heard them come dangerously close, when verbally
barreling on so fast they don’t have time to stop, to saying that physical sexual
differences are a social construct.
Deconstructionism is notorious
for lynching philosophical straw men. They love to pounce on other thinkers
and say, "Aha! There you have an Enlightenment Assumption," meaning
a dubious idea from the eighteenth century. But the Enlightenment was 200 years
ago, and I have yet to see any dubious idea thus pilloried that people actually
believe today, except for those that are baldly true.
One of the ironies of deconstructionism
is that while it is obsessed with the idea of social constructs, it knows very
little about actual construction of anything. I cannot help observing that the
Empire State Building is manifestly a social construct, in that it was constructed
by a society. This does not seem to result in its being any less real. Does
it not follow, if the world is a social construct, that what we have constructed,
exists?
One of the sad things about
deconstructionism as a philosophy is that, to their credit, America’s actual
philosophy departments in the universities aren’t very interested in it and
tend not to teach it. Deconstructionism is big in English, anthropology, and
anything else that studies culture, but not in philosophy itself. (You can verify
this in the online course catalogue of your local college.) The reason, of course,
is that if one is fully explicit about it as a philosophy, its problems very
quickly come to the surface and it looks stupid. You have to expound it bit
by bit, never getting down to brass tacks or showing the whole thing at once,
for it to seem plausible. Only in the subjective thickets of the English department
can it thrive, much as Marxism lives on there after having died in the Economics
departments. Someone needs to tell the English departments of America to butt
out of other people’s disciplines that they don’t understand.
One of the most comical
things one can do with deconstructionism is apply it to itself. For example, one
favorite deconstructionist idea is that, to put it bluntly, words have no
meaning. (They call this the infinite play of the signifier.) I like
to ask them whether they think this applies to tenure contracts, specifically
theirs. Or to the writing on their paycheck. If you are in college or know someone
who is, try asking this question, or try having it asked, to a professor who
believes in this stuff. I am collecting responses to be published in a future
article.
It has been said that Deconstructionism
is the opiate of an obsolete intellectual class. Non-technical intellectuals,
having deliberately rejected their natural role of inculcating our cultural
heritage into the next generation, have nothing to do and are frustrated at
seeing that all the rewards for intellectual activity in our society flow to
the technical intelligentsia and the producers of mass culture. Since they don’t
value our heritage as heritage, they have only two sources of satisfaction left:
corrupting the young and feeling smarter than everyone else. Deconstructionism
is perfect for corrupting the young because it is the ideal way to systematize
the general cynicism and disrespect for authority that are the natural condition
of contemporary college youth. It raises to the level of a philosophical system
the intuition that everything grown-ups do is a fraud. It is the metaphysics
of Holden Caulfield. It enables the practitioner to tell himself that he is
among the privileged group of insiders who know that the Wizard of Oz is behind
the curtain.
This is wonderful stuff
to contemplate in a café in Berkeley or Cambridge with a cup of cappuccino
in one hand. It suggests a whole philosophy of life, a certain attitude, even
a lifestyle. It was once remarked that deconstructionist women all seem to wear
no makeup and their hair tightly pulled back to embody the astringent zeal of
deconstructionism and its refusal to be taken in by the surface prettiness of
culture. I’m not sure this is true, but deconstructionists’ apartments tend
to be decorated with a lot of ironically vulgar things, like corny advertisements,
suggesting that this object could only be here because, although worthless in
its own right, its owner enjoys knowing the secret mechanism that produces it
and laughs at the peasants who fall for this stuff naively. It could be my
imagination,
but I think I perceive the biggest vogue for deconstructionism among people
who have moved to the great centers of culture from the to them hopeless heartland
and whose desire to be members of the culture club is greatest. The sort of
people who actually find it thrilling, rather than oddly without point, to find
concepts of nosebleed levels of esotericism littering ordinary comic novels
like David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. It’s a wonder they haven’t
perfected a secret handshake.
Deconstructionism is essential
to the Left because the proposition that there is no real world is the only
remaining way to save the manifold absurdities of liberalism. Forests have been
leveled and careers spent in mastering this cult; their investment in it is
enormous and they can ill-afford its discrediting. Conservatives must become
more philosophic and undertake deliberate acts of intellectual aggression on
the abstract plane. We are being attacked there, for heaven’s sake, so it’s time to
fight back, particularly since our own philosophic heritage is more
than strong enough to beat it. We must constantly reiterate that the
intellectually-advanced
opposition does not believe in a real world and that they teach this nonsense
to impressionable young people. We must deprive them of the intellectual prestige
of being sophisticated and of the credibility with this public that this produces.
We must deprive liberal academics of their status as privileged arbiters of
our culture. This really is a battle we can win if we will but make it an issue.
Note: Click
here for an article about the way deconstructionism has attracted
the favorable attention of some evangelical Christians for the weak reason that
it deconstructs a few modern shibboleths they despise. If this is a trend, it
must stop right now. I can imagine no more certain way to guarantee the intellectual
suicide of Christianity in this country than to infect it with this nonsense.
Under deconstructionist assumptions, Christianity is just another
social construct,
not the revealed truth. No amount of intellectual squirming can
evade this conclusion,
which is entailed by the fundamental principles of this philosophy.
If sin and
salvation are social constructs, God has nothing to do with them.
If God is
a social construct, there is no reason to worship Him.
Robert Locke resides in New York City. You can e-mail him at
[EMAIL PROTECTED] Others of his articles may be found on
vdare.com and robertlocke.com.
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