Understanding Woke Tactics Pt. 5: How Deconstruction is Done in the Culture.

In my last essay I discussed Deconstruction in term of it being a philosophical strategy. You can find that essay here.

In this essay I’d like to show what deconstruction looks like. That is, I want to explain a number of way in which people attempt to use deconstruction to attack, undermine, subvert and dissolve the meaning of concepts, arguments, ideal, ideologies, claims an assertions that they do not agree with. My goal here is to paint a picture of the sorts of moves that are made be people in the culture who are engaged in various deconstructive maneuvers. This is not going to be an exhaustive survey of how Jacques Derrida (the father of deconstruction) thought about and understood deconstruction.

To remind us of what Derridean deconstruction sets out to do let us quote John Searle:

”Characteristically the deconstructionist does not attempt to prove or refute, to establish or confirm, and he is certainly not seeking the truth.[2] On the contrary, this whole family of concepts is part of the logocentrism he wants to overcome; rather he seeks to undermine, or call in question, or overcome, or breach, or disclose complicities.” ¹

The goal is to undermine, subvert, blur lines, remove certainty, and insinuate that whatever is being deconstructed is complicit is such things as racism, sexism, and systemic oppression. As such, the deconstruction of a text very often does not look like a straight forward and good faith interpretation of the text, but rather a deeply contorted and cynical reading.

Now the deconstruction that we see in the culture at large does not look like the deconstruction that is found in Derrida’s work. The reason for this is that philosophical ideas do not enter into the culture and make their way through it unchanged. An nice analogy is to say that academics are like intellectual chefs cooking up ideas to be served to the culture, and some of those ideas are swallowed by the culture and some of them are spit out by the culture. When the culture swallows and idea it is not left unchanged. The technicalities of intellectual ideas rarely stay fully intact when an ideas is swallowed by the culture. Rather, when an idea is swallowed up by the culture it is metabolized into the culture and this changes the idea in ways that the creator of the idea may not expect. In the same way that a slice of cake does not remain the same after you eat it (it’s is digested and metabolized) ideas are digested and metabolized by the culture. The very often produces a version of the idea that maintains much of the basic impulse of the original academic idea, but very often changed in important ways.

In the case of deconstruction, The way this has occurred is to jettison Derrida’s technical details and methods, while taking in some of his basic impulses. In other words, the culture has metabolized the very detailed and complicated deconstructive philosophy of Jacques Derrida into something like a meme. It is the meme-ification of deconstruction.

The meme-ified version of deconstruction holds onto just a few simplified ideas from Derrida’s philosophy while adding in elements from various other philosophers and thinkers. I will not trace each of these ideas to their original thinkers as there is not space here for that, I’ll just provide a snapshot of what has emerged as Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction has been metabolized by the culture.

1. Anything can be reinterpreted in many different ways, and there is no “best” way to interpret anything. Any text can be validly re-interpreted from any perspective.

2. The intent of the speaker, writer, or author does not matter, what matters is how something is interpreted, and how it is received by others. (this is sometime explained as “impact not intent”)

3. Anything can be re-framed, recontextualized, and deconstextualized

4. Ideas, thoughts, words, texts, art, and other things that have meaning can carry “weight” That is, some idea, concepts, texts, etc, can have more power than other ideas, and one way to take the power out of an idea is to make fun of it.

5. Just like there is no single correct way to interpret a text, there is no single correct way to interpret the world.

6. Everyone is motivated by biases, self interest, and the drive for power, and those things lurk in the background of all claims to truth or morality. Further, arguments, reasons, and justifications are just excuses that are meant to mask the real goal of the claims people make: to justify the use of power.

7.  Categories are constructed arbitrarily according to the biases and self interest of the people who constructed them. Categories do not describe the way the world is, categories are the product of the way people with a particular ideology wanted everyone to think about the world. (For example, deconstructors think there is no good reason categorize everyone as “men” and “women.” We could just have easily divided people up according to their eye color but straight white men didn’t like trans and non-binary people so they said everyone has to be either a man or a woman in order to justify their bigotry.)

8. They will read into the marginal details of a text in order to change its meaning.

 To that end the deconstruction of something will very often look like:

-Focusing on minor details and drawing unjustified conclusions about what is being said.

-Pedantically nitpicking the definitions of words in order to deliberately miss the point of what is being said. (I owe this insight to “Cynical Theories” by Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay)

-Reading something in the most uncharitable way possible in order to insinuate it says something it does not say

-Taking video clips and soundbytes out of their context and reassembling them in ways which change the meaning

-Taking a suspicious view of the thing being deconstructed, as though the creator is not to be trusted and has something to hide. (This is sometimes called a hermeneutics of suspicion)

-Ignoring the truth of what has been said and instead focusing on who (supposedly) benefits from the idea and whose interests are served by adopting the idea.

-Reading power-dynamics into a text in order to reinterpret it.

-Making fun of and mocking the thing to be deconstructed in a way that misrepresents it.

-Claiming that a the thing to be deconstructed is “rooted” in a litany of things (white supremacy, sexism, racism, homophobia, etc) even if the text has nothing of the sort in it.

The result of all of this is that in the hands of the person doing deconstruction, whatever is being deconstructed will have its meaning twisted, corrupted, contorted, changed, altered, expanded, recontextualized, and unchained from whatever the original meaning might have been. Ideas, concepts, text, etc will be declared to be filled with racism, sexism, and all manner of bigotry.  Perfectly reasonable claims will be declared to be poisonous, evil, and harmful on the basis of even the most tenuous  association with people or ideologies deemed to be oppressive. Ideas that are perfectly clear will be reinterpreted such that it will no longer be clear what the original meaning was. The lines and boundaries of the definitions will be blurred so that communicating clearly will become increasingly difficult. Texts, ideas, concepts, images, etc, will be juxtaposed with unrelated texts, ideas, concepts, images, etc in order to change the interpretive context so that the original meaning is obscured.

This is how deconstruction operates in the culture. It is an endless swirl of interpretive nonsense that operates at the level of meaning in order to accomplish the goals of the woke activists. The result is that it can seem as though it is impossible to communicate clearly because no matter how clearly you think you are communicating what ever you said gets ripped apart, and what ever message you try to deliver dies the death of a thousand misinterpretations.

In this situation it can become very difficult to try to say anything. People will be silent and refuse to even try to say what they think for fear of being misinterpreted. It becomes very difficult to have authentic meaningful exchanges because everything that is said gets deconstructed and the meaning is lost or obscured.

Welcome to postmodernsim.

We need to realize that we live in a postmodern world, and that in a postmodern world as soon as we attempt to communicate whatever message we seek to communicate gets deconstructed. Understanding why and how this occurs is very important if we want to learn to communicate effectively in an environment full of people looking to deconstruct everything we say.

In my next essay we will look at specific examples of deconstruction and examine them so that we can get a good grasp on actually instances of deconstruction so you can learn to recognize this tactic when you see it. I will also provide some ideas for how you can deal with deconstructive tactics in a way that allows your message to be heard in spite of deconstructive noise.

Thank you for reading.

Sincerely,

Wokal_distance

1. John R. Searle, “The Word Turned Upside Down,” New York Review of Books, October 27, 1983, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1983/10/27/the-word-turned-upside-down/.