Deconstructing

Two prefatory points:

1) What follows is going to be something new for me. Rather than constructing and thinking about a piece of writing, this is just going to be a straight copying from some writing I did a few weeks back. I just started writing and the body of this blog will be word for word from that. As such, there is less argument and more contemplation. I'd love to hear feedback/criticism.

2) I don't believe I've read any explicit deconstruction literature; but I have read a good deal of recent literature that has all the general tendencies which I perhaps incorrectly presume to be a part of the deconstructionist goals. In general, I'm sure I haven't read near enough on this subject. I also believe that some people who are labeled deconstructionists, don't like the term. This may point to something about their thinking.

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When one deconstructs, destabilizes, disfigures, fractures, delimits, or muddles the very concepts in question, what is left? More importantly, where is that person then left? On what basis can they discuss the given thing? By transfiguring the words, by doing all the things from the list above, what are they then talking about? Something new? What are they then critiquing? Can the deconstructionist talk? And thus, can the deconstructionist think?

Perhaps they are aware of this, and this is what leads to their abstruse rhetoric which obfuscates the reader into frustration, anger, and then dismissal. Their text leads to submission of the reader. Communication is relegated to a realm of errors and is thus done away with. This leads us back to the guiding question: how can the deconstructionist think. If its transmission, and thus logos itself, is unable to do its job, what does the intellect offer? Indeed, what progress is made from human discourse?

Perhaps something new is more appropriate. Let us hope progress is a concern. Correcting error is indeed progress, but to do away with so fundamental of an object, concepts themselves, is to do away with one's own progress. So the deconstructionists are inventive; forging ahead, and finding new concepts. They create a new form to human discourse. But can we then call it discourse? Earlier I mentioned there is a loss of communication. So maybe there is some vestige of discourse still present. At the very least, if there is to be any progress, there must be some resemblance to the former discourse and this new, "non-discourse".

phenonmenology of time

Here is an article from NPR that talks about some of the same stuff I more or less parroted in a previous blog.

As far as an original blog from me, perhaps I'll write one soon.