Talk:Deconstruction

nerd note

I want to point out, as a geek (and someone who doesn't understand literary criticism a bit) what I think about this article.

Article about deconstruction should, at least in the first few paragraphs, describe, what deconstruction is for those who does not know it. It shouldn't be a paper about deconstruction or discussion about it. BUT - the first three paragraphs, which should include the most important basis of the described thing, is written what desconstruction is not (i don't care what it's NOT!) and describing it all in some strange words I don't understand.

that's a bit of a problem, as deconstruction is defined by it's creator by saying what it isn't. what you want doesn't matter; doesn't exist. that's kind of the point. each of us deconstructs differently than everyone else. what it is for you is different than what it is for me. for me to say what it is limits it to just my version. I have given examples from my POV further down this discussion. Now, if Deconstruction has no meaning to you, perhaps you should consider posting in a discussion where you know something about the subject matter rather than claim (as you are about to) that it shouldn't have an article because you don't understand it.96.24.93.114 (talk) 03:40, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

Just give a quick note at the beginning of the article to say, what deconstruction is - if someone can say it. If it's something that cannot be described as such, I don't know if it deserves an article :P --89.24.72.230 (talk) 14:06, 10 August 2008 (UTC)

see? I told you you'd say that.96.24.93.114 (talk) 03:40, 3 December 2011 (UTC)

I once heard a philosophy grad student discuss, for an hour, whether meanings existed. At the end of it, someone raised their hand and asked him what he meant by "exists." Before he could answer, someone added that they weren't sure what he meant by "meaning." He answered with a quote from Quine (I think, or it might have been Hume, I've forgotten)... something like: "our argument is not circular. Rather, its approximate form is that of a closed curve in space."

The problem isn't that no one has defined deconstruction in this article, it's that no one has ever defined it at all (successfully), leaving no one with much of anything constructive to say. I suspect that, much like the philosophy of language, the entire field of deconstructionism is one gigantic logical fallacy, shrouded in the mists of increasingly obtuse terminology designed specifically to avoid the realization that everything its practitioners have ever done (usually with the best of intentions) has been undermined by faulty assumptions.

That said, I don't really understand deconstruction any better than I understand quantum computing or astrobiology, so who am I to pass judgment. 71.81.78.66 (talk) 23:56, 12 August 2008 (UTC)

You'll note that this page is for planning the wikipedia article explaining deconstruction not for debating the merits of the topic itself...but having said that I would like to respond on one point. Derrida's work emphasises the importance of the involvement of language when we are doing philosophy but language (and meaning and knowledge) are fundamentally metaphysical for Derrida. This is because they involve an appeal to a presence beyond themselves and are therefore tied up with questions of being and the basic transcendentalism of metaphysical thought. I'd therefore argue that Derrida is not operating in some kind of linguistic bubble constructed in false assumption, through circularity, as you suggest. Derrida's philosophy works intimately with questions of the real and of meaning and obviously operates with this concepts even while problematising them because (as you seem to imply) it would be difficult to philosophise or even write without these terms implicitly operating to a greater or lesser degree. If Derrida's questioning appears to denigrate the terms "real" and "meaning" more than you are comfortable with then this denigration as you see it does not originate with Derrida but with Husserl's phenomenology - where it is argued quite convincingly and, dare I say it, in an exceedingly analytic manner that all we know of the real and meaning is derived from our conscious experience...it is therefore the assumption of the supposed externality of the external world that one should reject first. If you are interested in logical fallacies then you could derive great enjoyment from Derrida's demonstrations of the aporia in pure philosophical thought (such as that in the purest of transcendental philosophical thought, that of an objective external world) but once again this manner of thinking does not originate with Derrida but with Kant - remember that Kant's text is titled the "Critique of Pure Reason". Seferin (talk) 10:42, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Say what? Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 15:34, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

So try harder. Seferin (talk) 17:23, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Sorry for being a bit flip. I guess we just have different outlooks: my approach to writing is that the burden is on the writer to express himself clearly and concisely, rather than being on the reader to decipher sesquipedalian prolixity. Deconstruct that. ;-) Short Brigade Harvester Boris (talk) 17:59, 14 August 2008 (UTC)

Yeah, sorry - but obviously it is easier to express yourself clearly when all you want to say is "The toast is on the table" as against trying to indicate to someone how they are subtly confused on a difficult topic. Not being able to understand the clarification could be considered part of their initial confusion and not necessarily part of my attempt to clarify the matter with limited space and time. If they already understood the clarification then they would not have been confused so some work is always required. My basic strategy was to demonstrate how much Derrida shares the concerns raised by 71.81.78.66 and indicate how the implied criticism of Derrida can actually be pinned on his predecessors Husserl and Kant (thinkers that no one ever derides as bullshit despite advocating some of the positions that are attributed to Derrida in the first place and the technical difficulty of their philosophical prose). [btw - love the thesaurus! I had to google "sesquipedalian" and "prolixity". So sometimes work is required to understand other people and our desire not to be confused is all that is required to take some responsibility for overcoming our confusion :0P ] Seferin (talk) 16:10, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

well, I have to admit I had to read your comment several times and I still don't understand it. Well, you are trying to say, that instead of cycling arguments, deconstruction somehow escape this cycle. Is this, what that term, deconstruction, mean? Or is it only a way to escape this cycle?

remember, I wrote, that I know nothing about this subject - and that's what encyclopedia should be for - to explain the term to me. There are many articles about nearly-undefinable terms. All I want to know is what deconstruction means, that means for example, what new it brings to philosophy.

it can use philosophic terms, but these should be explained - or linked to another article. Let's look at, for example, article Leaf node - it's explained in terms of CompSci, but these are all linked and explained elsewhere. .... I hope you get my point :) --89.24.72.230 (talk) 17:23, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

Sorry 89.24.72.230, I was replying to 71.81.78.66 rather than yourself. I'm sorry if you don't understand some of the words being used to explain deconstruction. I would love to be able to link to other articles that could explain the explanatory terminology itself that is being used on the deconstruction page but unfortunately a lot of those articles don't seem to exist yet. The page on structuralism might sound promising but it doesn't really help because Derrida refers to a structural mode of description in Husserl's philosophy that doesn't have its own article. Similarly there does not appear to be a page to explain what origin means in a technical philosophical sense that could be related to Derrida's use the term. I've linked to related terms like hermeneutics and immanent critique but these can't actually be expected to explain deconstruction merely by association. Perhaps one of the biggest problems is the lack of a page on the phenomenological reduction. Perhaps wikipedia is just stronger on CompSci pages at the moment than it is on continental philosophy?

Now it is complicated, but there is actually a serious amount of explanation on the page at this stage. Though maybe it can't be figured out without learning to philosophise at least a little bit. For example: Try asking yourself what is meant by methodology in the sense Derrida means when he states "deconstruction is not a methodology" and try to figure out what kind of methodology is leftover without that sense of methodology that Derrida rejects. If you can realise what Beardsworth means when he describes "a procedural form of judgement" and how that might be a problem then you have been prompted by deconstruction to think much more deeply about a fundamental tool of philosophy and your own interest of computer programming! (Since procedural judgement is the only kind of judgement that a computer programme can use) You will then have started to grasp some aspect of the significance of what deconstruction means. Figure it out in little bits at a time. I have barely a clue how deconstruction is related to Lacanian psychoanalysis because I've never read Lacan but I've a pretty clear idea of how it relates to Husserl's phenomenology...you don't have to understand absolutely everything all at once to get a sense of what the term deconstruction means and once you start to figure parts of it out you realise how exciting it is to begin thinking through the kinds of question it raises. Seferin (talk) 23:49, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Isn't this article and the discussion just a perfect example of the confusion that arises from deconstruction? The fact that it seems so difficult to even give a simple definition is crazy. Reading the article, I'm wondering if a true article on it would require multiple sections, side by side, lifting up opposing interpretations of each point of deconstruction. Of course you can't give a definition of it, if you could, a deconstructionist would show up and deconstruct it. Continental philosophy always gave me a headache - just seems like a moving target. Complex things are very hard to explain, but I do wonder, if you can't at least define something simply, do you really understand it? Maybe some of the folks trying to write this article should leave it to those who actually know what they're talking about. 12:12 5 January 2010 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 162.82.215.197 (talk) 17:13, 5 February 2010 (UTC)

The Emperor Has No Clothes

No one knows what Deconstruction is. Every conversation on Deconstruction is just two people pretending to know what Deconstruction is. More people need to be honest about this. Prominence should be given to the clear critism of Deconstruction as nonsense from academics who are comprehensible, such as Noam Chomsky. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.111.243.37 (talk • contribs)

Well, if you look above, you'll see a conversation in which I make absolutely no attempt to pretend to know what deconstruction is. :) Chomsky would probably be a good source for this article -- do you have a particular writing by him in mind? rspεεr (talk) 23:19, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

---

I've been looking over the comments for a place to say this, and this is as good a place as any. I actually know exactly what "deconstruction" is. I'm a deconstructionist poet. I will not edit the article as long as it exists in some form. Deconstruction is an existentialist concept. here is a simplified view: the meaning of what I say can exist in one of 3 places: 1. my mind as I write. 2. the words. 3. your mind as you read. Deconstruction says the real meaning is in the words, because any meaning you and I may say exists is subjective. the text, or thought-out collection of words to most precisely transmit the meaning from me to you is what matters. any pride I may have in assembling the words doesn't matter. any feelings you attach to understanding the text doesn't matter. what matters is that the meaning is transmitted accurately. this seems easy enough until you consider the over-all ambiguity of language. how often does it happen that 2 words that seem to mean the same thing really don't, and should not be used interchangeably, but are. the "corrosive nihilism" that has been used to criticize deconstruction, from my experience, would seem to be that some words, some language would cease to be. it happens to me when I remove unneeded words from a poem and discover, or make obvious hidden and unseen meanings by having words modify the ideas before and after them in context. In my opinion, deconstruction is related to the Zen concept of the "transmission of mind", except instead of a lifelong search for spiritual understanding, it is a disciplined study through which clarity is achieved and improved. Discussion, like here, is but one deconstructionist method. As for Heidegger and Nietzsche, well, an exaggerated (perhaps) comparison would be that if there is a mis-spelled word, a deconstructionist might fix the spelling, or choose another word. Heidegger would have us re-write the whole article, and Nietzsche would blow up the server farm the wiki is on and start from scratch.

I write this because so much of what we do is just the informal deconstruction techniques we have developed as individuals (and sometimes even share), and no one gets it (deconstruction at work: I had written "understands" instead of "gets", but I think the meaning is better communicated this way. people understand the words, but don't get the meaning).96.24.93.114 (talk) 23:07, 2 December 2011 (UTC)

translation

I read the first sentence and decided to go no further with the article. Can the author please arrange for his/her text to be translated into standard English ? Thank you. Pamour (talk) 09:13, 17 June 2011 (UTC)

I think the spelling is getting worse - what appear to be quotes have so many mistakes, I assume they are translations by someone for whom English is not a first language. I am not a philiospher, but a Gnome trying to correct typo's; however, when the meaning is unclear, it is difficult to ascertain what is a mistake and what isn't.
Arjayay (talk) 17:25, 8 December 2011 (UTC)

Deconstructing deconstruction

The author of this article has fallen into the trap maybe of describing the subject matter in a style to appeal to fans of Derrida, a style which judging by the weight of criticism the article has received clearly does not appeal to everyone, but so far I have not found a rule in the Wikipedia principles against this. I am not sure the article entirely leads the way regarding the second of the five pillars of Wikipedia, namely neutrality and verifiable accuracy, but the first pillar states that Wikipedia is not a dictionary. If Wikipedia were a dictionary, then on the one hand, those who criticise the article for a lack of a snappy definition at the beginning would have a stronger case, but on the other hand, the nature of the subject matter would really not sit very well in Wikipedia. The article makes the important point, that the originator of the term apparently had his reasons for refusing to define it. It also includes at least references to some of the significant attempts of others in the field to do so.

I find some of the criticism here above of this brave and ambitious but flawed article to be rather harsh for Wikipedia, which is founded on openness, and editors are asked on the fourth pillar to be welcoming to others. How about everyone let’s just focus on the business of building Wikipedia and be constructive (no pun intended) about how to improve the article. Jonathan G. G. Lewis 02:50, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

Reboot

In attempts to research this field elsewhere I notice several things:

Attempts to define Deconstruction by use of its own jargon are unsuccessful at communication, if standards of success formulated elsewhere are compared with those attempts. Perhaps the notions of recursion or tautology are evident.

The use of the term "text" can be replaced in some measure by the term "symbol transmission."

Symbol transmission conveys "meta" meaning by the very fact of symbol transmission. (Sender assumes message or meaning is necessary to transmit; recipient assumes sender assumes recipient in need of meaning, etc.)

Theories of knowledge are employed by deconstructionist thinkers.

Evolutionary psycho-physiology is not much present in deconstructionist dialog. Nor is modern data compression theory, cybernetic theory, information theory, thermodynamic theory as applied to information, behavioral psychyology, etc. Deconstruction theory often does not employ (avoids?) them.

Topics for discussion. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 74.81.189.18 (talk) 18:58, 7 February 2012 (UTC)