Deconstruction
from 1967 Derrida's three books of 1967
Find the pair where one term is treated as primary and the other as derivative, then show the primary term depends on what it was supposed to be independent of.
- Active
- from 1967
- Where
- Paris
- Also
- déconstruction
- Status
- In use
- Tradition
- Continental procedures
What it is
Deconstruction works on oppositions in which one side is treated as original and the other as a fallen or secondary version: speech over writing, presence over absence, nature over culture, literal over figurative.
The move has two stages. First show that the hierarchy is not neutral but ranked. Then show that the privileged term can only be defined by reference to the term it subordinates — that it depends on what it was supposed to precede. The result is not a reversal but an unsettling, since a straight reversal would simply install a new hierarchy.
How it works
Locate an opposition in the text where one term is treated as primary. Show that the ranking is doing work rather than merely reporting a fact. Find where the text itself, often at its margins, concedes that the primary term relies on the secondary. Hold the reversal open rather than completing it.
Derrida insists the material must come from the text under examination. A deconstruction that imports its objection from outside is just a criticism.
The moves, in order
- Locate an opposition with a ranked pair
- Show that the ranking is doing work in the argument
- Find where the text concedes the primary term's dependence on the secondary
- Do not complete the reversal into a new hierarchy
- Leave the opposition unsettled
The procedure
Proposition The award's permanent-casual distinction cannot do the work the policy gives it.
- The workforce policy treats permanent employment as the norm and casual as the deviation — casuals are defined throughout as those without the entitlements permanents have, and never in their own terms.
- The ranking does work: it justifies paying the loading as compensation for an absence, and it justifies excluding casuals from consultation on the ground that they are temporary.
- But the policy's own rostering section concedes that peak capacity is met entirely by casuals, that the permanent roster is set after the casual pool is confirmed, and that a permanent's guaranteed hours are guaranteed because casuals absorb the variation.
- So the permanent position is not prior to and independent of the casual one. It is produced by it: the security that defines permanence exists because someone else carries the insecurity.
- The conclusion is not that casuals are really the permanent ones. It is that the two are constituted together and the policy's ranking misdescribes its own arrangement.
Therefore The distinction cannot bear the justificatory weight the policy puts on it, since the entitlement it treats as the norm is produced by the absence it treats as the deviation.
Every step came from the policy's own text, including the rostering section that undoes the ranking. That is the requirement — an objection brought in from outside would be a criticism of the policy rather than a deconstruction of it.
What it is good for
Documents and institutions organised around a pair of terms where one is silently ranked. Employment categories, planning categories and professional hierarchies are full of them.
Where it fails
It applies to everything, and a method that never fails to find something has trouble showing it found anything. Every opposition can be shown to have interdependent terms, so the result is guaranteed before the reading starts, and a procedure with a guaranteed outcome is not testing anything.
There is also no criterion for a bad deconstruction. Since the reading is meant to unsettle rather than to establish, it cannot be checked against what the text says, and Searle's complaint in his exchange with Derrida was precisely that the practice makes its own errors uncorrectable.
And it turns on itself with unusual force. The distinction between a deconstructive reading and an ordinary misreading is itself an opposition with a ranked pair, and the method gives no reason why that one should stand.
Common misconceptions
That it means destroying, or showing that texts mean nothing. Derrida denied both repeatedly and with visible irritation. The claim is that oppositions are unstable, not that meaning is absent.
Also that it is a technique that can be applied. Derrida insisted it was not a method at all — an assertion this entry is in some tension with, and the tension is worth knowing about.
Where it came from
Derrida's three books of 1967, principally Of Grammatology, arguing that the whole Western tradition privileges speech over writing and that the privilege cannot be sustained.
What became of it
Enormously influential in literary studies and law from the late 1970s, largely rejected in analytic philosophy, and now a settled if contested part of the humanities.
Lasting influence
Critical legal studies, much of literary theory, and a general suspicion of binary categories across the humanities.
Why it still matters
Diminished from its peak, and its central move survives wherever anyone asks who benefits from a distinction being drawn this way.
Put another way
Finding that the load-bearing wall is the one marked temporary.
Texts
Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology
Difficult and deliberately so. The section on the supplement in Rousseau is the clearest demonstration of the move.
Where to start
Read a short essay rather than the books. Signature Event Context shows the method working on a single argument.
The surprising bit
Its most concrete legacy is in employment and discrimination law, where showing that a supposedly neutral category is constituted by what it excludes has real consequences for real people.
In their own words
There is nothing outside the text
Who held it
John Searle, as its opponent
Connections
- Relies on
- The hermeneutic circle
- Parallel to
- Immanent critique
The verdict
A genuine insight about ranked oppositions, wrapped in a practice that cannot be checked and never fails.