Deconstruction, Gunkel

A review and notes on Deconstruction by David J. Gunkel.

Verdict: A brilliantly written introduction of deconstruction, with examples, history, and lots of cautionary notes. I have ready many texts introducing deconstruction and this is by far the best. A very approachable read.

Going Negative

• It is difficult to define deconstruction positively, so we begin by outlining the negative.
• Derrida is not the ‘father of deconstruction’
• Deconstruction is not negative. Was an attempt to translate Martin Heidegger’s Destruktion (from Being and Time - a “phenomenological destruktion of the history of ontology”). Deconstruction is not to disassemble, un-construct, take-apart. It is not negative, it is not an undoing - or at least, ‘just’ an undoing.
• Deconstruction is not analysis or critique in the sense that analysis is ‘loosening’/’unraveling’ and analysis follows the structuralist premise of identifying and isolating constitutencies or constitutions, or that critique is to separate, discern, cut, separate. In fact, deconstruction is concerned with the natural tendency towards the inability towards such separation.
• Deconstruction is not a method. A method is a ‘road to knowledge’ (Gasche). But deconstruction does not exist somewhere pure, external, abstract - in the same way that something like the scientific method might. Instead, deconstruction always already lies in the ideas it deconstructs.
• Deconstruction is not just discourse analysis. Deconstruction should not just be used to analyze discussion, statements, concepts, semantics; it must be applied to ideas on the level of institution, culture, tradition, structures.

Deconstructing Deconstruction

• Binary opposition - prevalent in metaphyics: being/nothing, inside/outside, mind/body, male/female, self/other, light/dark, real/fake, natural/artificial, good/evil (Beyond Good and Evil), positive/negative, simple/complex, pure/tainted, essential/accidental, imitated/imitation.
• Structuralism - understands reality as a network of differences and oppositions.
• Binary oppositions are expedient and perhaps even ‘natural’ to the flow of information both on a neural and conceptual/meta-intellectual level. But they are problematic because they too restrict our view and thinking of the world. They also assert unequal power distributions. All inequality is a manifestation of discretization - white/nonwhite, elite/nonelite, educated/noneducated, bourgeoisie/proletariat, native/immigrant, in/out, inside/outside, here/there. All binary oppositions privilege one pole over the other; it resides in a natural staggering which in its default instantiation assumes this inequality.

“Binary oppositions are not just a matter of discursive differnece; thye are the site of real social, political, and moral power.”

• Poststructuralism: a field of thought which seeks to subvert and complicate but not to directly oppose - direct opposition behind already on structuralist terms - the structuralist mode.
• Deconstruction as a ‘strategy’ is composed of the following two key steps, given a binary opposition which is unequal in weight by ‘default’:
  1. Inversion. We begin a playful act of subversive deconstruction by considering the inversion of prioritization - to place the concept which is at the bottom by default on top, and its opposite on top by default instead on the bottom. This encourages us to begin breaking down the binary opposition.
  2. Centering of an encompassing alternative. We can ‘round out’ the deconstruction strategy by now identifying an alternative structure which does not ‘resolve’ the opposition in the dialectic Hegelian sense, but instead encompasses both oppositions while respecting the differences between them. The result is what Spivak calls “critical intimacy”, what Haraway calls “blasphemy”, what Gunkel calls an “eruptive emerging concept”
• The Double Science - overturning and displacement.
• The process of displacement does not introduce Hegel’s nondialectical third term, which operates through the triad formula thesis-antithesis-synthesis. Deconstruction does not use the terms of dialectics.

For Instance

• Writing // Speaking. In the Western tradition, speech has primacy and priority over writing. Writing is subservient to speech; it captures what would have been spoken. The opposition between speech and writing frames a complete way of thinking. Derrida first initiates a deconstruction by inverting the opposition and playing with the primacy or precedence of writing over speaking, not on the basis of anthropological truth but rather as a step towards an emergent concept - the arche-writing, or simply writing (but not the ‘writing’ referred to in the writing//speaking opposition), which really was always already there, nesting in the tension of this opposition.
• Illusion // Real. The real undoubtedly has extreme supremacy over the illusory. Nietzsche initiates deconstruction with the inversion: “My philosophy an upside down Platonism… life in illusion as goal.” What this points us towards is not just a reorientation of the illusion and the real as a binary opposition but an emergent concept - the virtual, in which the real and the illusion meld together to the point of being together in the fabric of this unique space.
• Original // Copy. The original has precedence over the copy. For this reason the real Mona Lisa is not even comparable with a Mona Lisa printed on a piece of paper. The original is thought to be more real, more true, more reflective, more influential than any copy could be. A copy, it is thought, is just a reiteration of what has already been shown or said. When we invert the natural ordering, however, we arrive at in a world in which the copy tops the original, which points towards the emergence of a new concept - remix. Remix is neither original nor copy, but also both original and copy, because it both shameless takes from other sources and meshes them in a way that can be more transformative and influential than any one of these sources individually.
• Organic // Technological. Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto reunderstands feminist politics by first inverting the precedence of the organic over the technological, then by introducing the concept of the cyborg as an image which both is organic and technological and is neither organic nor technological. The cyborg is the posthuman figure resulting form the deconsturction of the human.

Consequences and Risks

• What is the value of deconstruction?
• Deconstruction opens up the possibility of thinking differently and to make a difference?
• Fight the power: the principle of noncontradiction is fundamental. However, logical oppositions are prejudicial; they are not neutral; they institute difference. Deconstruction offers us a way to think critically about those on the deprivileged side of the logical binary and to recognize the existence of the binary itself.
• Deconstruction is site-specific; there is no one deconstruction.
• Deconstruction deconstructs Eurocentrism and phallagocentrism.
• Although it is often accused of doing so, deconstruction never leads to relativism or indeterminism.
• “There is nothing outsdie the text” - All reality has the structure of a differential trace, one cannot experience or refer to the “real” except from and in an interpretative experience.
• Communicating deconstruction puts a strain on language. This part and parcel of deconstruction, given that language is a structuralist premise of differences.
• Deconstructionist interventions always risk appropriation and incorporation into binary logics.
• The work of deconstruction is never finished due to the eternal possibility of reincorporation.

Deconstruction does not provide solutions to existing problems. It seeks to deomntrate how the very way we conceive of and talk about a problem is already a problem.