Breaking down deconstruction with Derrida

It’s a question Derrida never quite wanted to answer. As with anything, he thought, if you define a word, you kill it in some sense; it does violence to that word. However, I don’t think it’s as complicated as has been made out. Deconstruction, basically, is the idea that if something is constructed, it can be deconstructed. Now, the first thing to say about that is: deconstruction is not destruction. You’re not pulling something apart so it doesn’t exist anymore. What you are doing is investigating the ways it was constructed.

Now, let’s take a really banal example: a chair. How is a chair constructed? I can just sit on the chair; that’s absolutely fine. That’s what most of us do, most of the time. If I pull back from that, though, and think about the chair and deconstruct it, I can look at that particular chair, at its style. I might look at ergonomics, at fashions. I might look at interior design. I might look at how wealthy the person who owns that chair is, or how poor the person is, where the wood came from, the economics of that – you can break the chair down. The chair is still there; however, it’s been deconstructed. What Derrida did was to take this idea that you can deconstruct something and apply it to things like truth or God or justice.

For instance, with God, we can’t actually prove whether there’s a God. We can have faith that there is or, indeed, we can have faith that there’s not. Both of those positions are valid; however, they are faith, not knowledge. One day, perhaps, we will find out if there’s a God and which religion wins, as it were. Until then, in order to look at God, we have to look at the way that that concept works within a community, within a culture, a country, a State and within politics.

For Derrida, we have to look at a word like God the way we look at religion. We look at religion, which is generating the idea of God, but we can’t actually find God to be true. We can deconstruct it, and we can deconstruct religion. Interestingly, he said a similar thing about truth. Derrida has a reputation of believing there’s no truth, and he’s seen as a relativist – a total relativist. This was a position Derrida argued against throughout his life. What he did say was that we can’t know whether there is Truth – Truth, in the capital T philosopher’s way.

One of the remarkable things about Derrida’s work was that it spread throughout the culture in subjects like cinema studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies. There are a few reasons for this. One was the charisma of Derrida. He was what many people would want a French philosopher to look like: he smoked a pipe, he had tall hair, he spoke in gnomic, difficult, sentences. He also established that no text can be coherent, which is what deconstruction does. He said there is no absolute truth to a text – and by text, we can also refer to films, art, anything. For Derrida, all of these were texts to be read.

It was a very powerful tool for looking at how, for instance, a novel worked – to look at not just what was in the novel, and certainly not just the author’s intention, but what was left out of the novel, how the novel wasn’t consistent, how a word was used one way at a certain point or a different way at a different point. In looking at film, one might ask why a particular film is cut in a certain way, what ideology it’s trying to put forward, what ideology it’s failing to put forward, what characters there are, what characters there aren’t, why the decisions have been made to do that.

For Derrida, there could be no text that made absolute sense, and for many of his followers, this was an incredibly powerful tool for getting inside a text, for pulling it apart. One of his followers, J. Hillis Miller, famously said, ‘You’re looking for the thread to pull things apart.’ Now, that is probably the most extreme version of deconstruction and one that Derrida would not have supported. He loved the books he deconstructed, and said he did. He did not want to get rid of these things.

What he did in literature, he also did in philosophy. He saw that those texts were also constructed by human beings, that they were cultural rather than natural and that you could look for inconsistencies. You could look for what he called apories – a Socratic term – things that could not be thought through. So, Derrida gave many thinkers the liberty to look at these things in detail. And this was taken up by popular culture. Things like television shows were deconstructed and many of the deconstructive gestures were taken on, even in things like advertising. Derrida would often start an interview by pointing out that there’s a camera, that there’s a producer, that there’s a sound person, pointing out how it was a fake, inauthentic environment that was put together.

Deconstruction challenges some of our most fundamental beliefs – statements like ‘Equality is better than inequality.’ For many of us, we would take that on as a shibboleth. That’s something we just believe. However, Derrida wants to look at who is saying it, why they’re saying it, what we mean by those terms equality and inequality.

One of the most fascinating things about Derrida is that he looks at the way that philosophy, in particular, has had a version of what it is to be human that it has stuck to. So, for someone like Kant, the model of being a human was a bit like me: white, male, heterosexual. For too long, that’s been an unexamined assumption of philosophy that defines humans. In a sense, what Derrida was doing was what science does. It says that the sample group is much wider now – and that sample group is speaking.

When we say something like equality is better than inequality, who is speaking in that sentence? Is it the people we’ve always seen as “normal” humans? What does that mean? It can be a powerful move to keep down difference, to keep down different identities. So, politically, Derrida makes a huge impact in giving voice to people who haven’t had a voice before and recognising that this disturbs all of philosophy, whether they’re female voices, non-white voices or non-English voices in the anglosphere. He says that other people have the right to speak, other people have identities and that philosophy is foolish, simply foolish, if it doesn’t take on these different characters in the culture.

Derrida was a controversial figure when he was alive. He’s a controversial figure now. Part of the reason for that is he’s seen as opening up the world of, for instance, wokeness, where different voices are given the right to speak. One of the things about philosophy, and much of politics, religion and other cultures, is that they’ve treated what it is to be human as someone like me: a white, heterosexual, middle class male.

However, the sample group of people who are allowed to speak has widened considerably. It was widening in Derrida’s time and has widened even more now. For Derrida, this was crucial. It’s almost a scientific belief that if you have a greater sample group, you have to adjust your findings. One of the things philosophy has been bad at, just as politics and religion have been bad at, is changing their findings – changing what it is to be a human being, what it means, what the experience of being human is. Derrida was very much against this pinning down of a single type of being human.

He was very aware of feminist developments while he was alive, of postcolonialism, of voices from other cultures speaking. Again, this comes back to his own disputed identity in many ways. Derrida remains controversial in that, and he’s also controversial within the academy.

You’ll see a lot of people fighting against the opening up of the culture to different voices, the disputing of the canon of literature, for instance. The canon of literature has been pretty much set. Dead white males is one phrase for it. With other voices coming in, other truths are being spoken. The idea that dead white male literature is better has been proved false. A development is happening as we go along, and it also feeds into movements of social justice that other voices coming together as communities are pushing back against what they believe to be a false representation of what it is to be human and a false representation of who should be in power, and how that power is in some sense natural rather than cultural. Derrida is very important for many of the people who are fighting against the rigidity of a system, or a top-down system. It has made him a very controversial figure within politics and philosophy.

Deconstruction is often seen as existing just in the rarefied world of philosophy – difficult, obscure and so forth – but I strongly believe it should be part of all of our lives; that we can look around us and see how whatever we encounter is, in some way, a part of the culture, is cultural rather than natural, and that each of us in small or big ways can look at these things which we are told to believe that are true and have been true forever. We can really question whether they are true, but also who is saying they’re true and why.