How to Deconstruct Almost Anything, by a Software Engineer

http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html#

by lionhearted • 16 years ago

94 102 16 years ago

info.ucl.ac.be

lionhearted4• 16 years ago

I saw this here originally:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1489199

Thought it was worth its own post - I actually gained a little more respect for deconstruction after reading the article. Before I thought it was entirely nonsense, now I see that it might have some validity if used in an intelligent and honest way. Credit to dmlorenzetti for commenting with the link, very insightful.

petercooper• 16 years ago

"ac.be" is captured as the hostname here, but that's a domain suffix (it should be ucl.ac.be). It might be worth switching the HN suffix list to the Mozilla's suffix list? http://publicsuffix.org/

muhfuhkuh2• 16 years ago

While I should just shrug it off and say "haha, you got us, we're certainly stuffy", look at the things we often are trying to discuss in Literature.

Now, it's one thing to question the artistic merits of literature studied in academia, such as the almost impenetrable "Finnegan's Wake". It's not all because of its vernacular (I can't really read too much of it at a time because it blurs into almost gibberish after awhile and I lose track of stuff I'd just read a line prior), but because it seriously doesn't make any damned sense sometimes, which is common when alot of it is written stream of conscious.

But, I get the argument: literary criticism is self-perpetuating, self-congratulatory stuff in many cases. But, just as for every solid software developer who understands the art and science of software construction in the tradition of Fred Brooks or Steven McConnell, there is the spaghetti coder with terrible habits (pushing broken code to the repo, no code commenting, etc.). The same laziness and idiosyncratic behavior is rife in litcrit as well. For every Harold Bloom and James Wood, there's alot of hacks that toss off their "deconstructions" rife with tautologies and dense nonsense. It's part of any discipline to separate the good from the bad; the humanities is no different.

cschwarm• 16 years ago

Sorry, but that does not make sense to me.

A discipline either establishes common criteria to distinguish good stuff from bad stuff or it doesn't. And these should not be arbitrary otherwise the judgment remains subjective and therefore worthless.

Since you admit that "there's alot of hacks", it seems literary criticism has no criteria or they are mostly subjective. Otherwise, you wouldn't have such a lot of hacks, but just a few.

It obviously produces hardly anything worth knowing, no?

adw• 16 years ago

I like Radiohead. I don't much like the Spice Girls. Any criteria I could give you for why this is true, for me, is ultimately subjective.

muhfuhkuh2• 16 years ago

Oh, there is structure. Criticism comes in the following best practice, and you'll see this construct throughout most all litcrit (except for, you guessed it, the page-padding hacks who talk around the topic rather than about it):

1) Establish the "text" in question as well as the "context" of the text (certain themes, symbolism, diction, universality, etc.)

2) apply culturual congruity (whether you are applying the criticism to the time when the text was written or to modern times),

3) Establish your point of argument and/or analysis.

4) Apply argument to the text

5) Connect the evidence of this argument.

6) Conclusion

The fact that I use Bloom as a shining example of "good" criticism should steer you in the direction that there is quality there. His just one example of good work.

Is there an API to access Plato's Republic's quality hooks? No, but there are best practices. Just because you refuse to see them as common criteria doesn't diminish the task at hand. If you refuse to accept it as legitimate, you might as well refuse to accept there are such things as great literature and creation beyond the programmatic kind.

sophacles• 16 years ago

Are you kidding? Compare to software: There is a lot of bad code in the word. This code was written by hacks, who in my experience, seem to have no idea why their code is bad -- to the point of justifying it beyond absurdity\. Showing these people beautiful, well factored, well commented code frequently has no impact on them, they say "Oh, that is nice", but don't understand what makes it different than their hacky version.

This is within the field. From the outside, this is even more dense and impenetrable, and probably looks almost masturbatory. Despite this, there is a fairly strong correlation of "good style" and "good software" so there is at least some objective measure there.

Of course, since there are hacks in the software world (arguably the majority of them, since very few HNers run in the circles of bank software engineer or .Net programmer, and those people are the majority of programmers), the discussions on what makes good software probably don't result in anything worth knowing, or barely anyway.

I am not commenting on your overall conclusion, I don't know if lit. crit. is a worthy pursuit, but your argument is definitely lacking a sound basis.

\ I worked with a guy who would copy and paste program, with many many repetitions of blocks. After of getting a barely working result, would seemingly decide "oh functions are important in programming" and randomly break the code into a few functions, which each took 10+ arguments to carry state over from chunk to chunk. Since these were essentially just chaining the calls, none of the functions would be called elsewhere, no repetition was avoided, and extra cognitive load was added to reading the results. When this was done, the original author could not understand how it was different, let alone better.

michael_dorfman29• 16 years ago

Deconstruction is not a method, and does not follow a formula, and pointing out the (numerous, outrageous) errors in this piece would take more time than I have.

I sympathize with the author's desire to make fun of that which he doesn't understand, but ultimately, it's a shallow game.

lionhearted4• 16 years ago

> Deconstruction is not a method, and does not follow a formula, and pointing out the (numerous, outrageous) errors in this piece would take more time than I have.

C'mon, this is Hacker News, we don't say "This is wrong, but I won't tell you why" here. For what it's worth, I'd actually like to hear your perspective if you take the time.

The article provided a coherent explanation of deconstruction that jives with what my eyes see, which makes it the best thing I've seen on the topic. But if you see holes in it, why not take the time to point them out? I'd like to understand more since this style of academia seems to be influential in universities these days.

michael_dorfman29• 16 years ago

OK, I'll try to do this, but honestly, I don't have the kind of time it deserves.

Deconstruction is, roughly speaking (and believe, me, I'm speaking schematically here) for the purposes of this discussion, the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, and his followers. (We'll ignore, for the moment, the more literary analysis of Paul De Man, which often go under the name of deconstruction as well.)

Derrida makes it very clear throughout his writings that deconstruction is not a repeatable method which can be applied to a text, but rather, an engagement with a text on its own terms. So, there is no "formula" or set of steps that can be applied.

Second, despite the author's reduction of deconstruction to a branch of literary criticism, the texts in question are more often from the philosophical corpus than from the literary tradition. While it's true that Derrida devotes more attention to folks like Joyce, Celan and Genet than most philosophers do, the quantity of pages he devotes to them is a tiny fragment of the time he devotes to Heidegger, Husserl and Hegel, for instance.

Despite the author's step-by-step breakdown, deconstruction in practice doesn't work this way. If I were forced to generalize (and I suppose I am), I would say that deconstruction consists most often of a micrological reading (that is to say, a very close reading of the actual words of the text, not not just the broad concepts) which takes into account the (usually unconscious) assumptions that the author is working within. Most often, these assumptions, when taken to their logical conclusion lead to either a contradiction or an aporia, and the text often reflects this, unknowingly. So, a deconstructive reading often picks up on latent implications of the text itself.

I should point out that the author here is completely wrong when he writes "Step 2 -- Decide what the text says. This can be whatever you want...." This is egregiously incorrect. In fact, one of Derrida's main points is that we do not decide at all what the text says. (As an aside, decidability is actually a term of art within deconstruction, so the author's abuse of it here is particularly irksome. If he had say "figure out" instead of "decide" he'd have been less wrong on several counts.)

To take a concrete (and much celebrated) example, Derrida's "Plato's Pharmacy" is a reading of Plato's Phaedrus. It will make absolutely no sense to you if you haven't already read the Phaedrus closely, and are already familiar with the traditional interpretation of the text within philosophical circles. Sorry, but that's the bar to entry.

Assuming that you know the Phaedrus, then: the central moment in the text (according to the standard reading) is the condemnation of writing-- you know the passage. In the course of this, Plato (or rather Socrates, or rather, an Egyptian king in a legend recounted by Socrates recounted by Plato) compares writing to a drug, using the Greek word "pharmakon". Derrida shows that this word, like the English word "drug", has both a positive sense ("remedy") and a negative sense ("poison"), and cannot be reduced to either singular meaning. Furthermore, the oscillation between these two meanings cannot be fully controlled, but only understood through context, which is never saturated (never fully complete.) Put simply, if you call something a drug, you can't exclude either the positive or negative meaning in the mind of the listener. Now, at this point, Derrida then goes through the entire Platonic corpus, and quotes every time the word "pharmakon" or one of its cognates ("pharmikia", etc.) is mentioned, and shows the range of meanings implied by this term for Plato, and its implications for the passage in the Phaedrus. So far, so good. But here comes the kicker: Derrida shows that although Plato uses a variety of related terms throughout his works, there is one cognate which is notable by its absence: "pharmakos", meaning "scapegoat". And this ghost-reference to scapegoating seems to fit quite well with what Plato is doing with writing.

Now, I've trivialized Derrida's argument in at least a dozen ways in writing this-- and as I said, the above will not make any sense if you're not already steeped in the debates within the philosophical tradition about "writing" versus "speech", which are of little interest to anybody outside of the philosophical tradition. But that's a taste of what deconstruction is like, and how it operates.

I'll note in passing that there is only one "binary opposition" that Derrida is at all interested in within his work-- "interior" vs "exterior"-- and the "speech" vs "writing" discussion in Plato is a proxy for this.

The paper linked here make "jive with what your eyes see", because it was written by somebody on the outside, looking in. And I'm sure that if I were to write an outsider's view of a discipline I knew nothing about (say, astro-physics) it might look completely plausible to another outsider, while in reality bearing little resemblance to what actually goes on within the discipline.

Does that help at all?

bitwize2• 16 years ago

It's not that he won't tell you why.

It's that until you've at least acquired core competence in Husserl, Heidegger, Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud and Levinas, being exposed to the OT VIII levels of post-structuralist theory is likely to cause your brain to explode.

_delirium2• 16 years ago

That's actually one way in which I think Derrida did somewhat of a disservice to himself. Someone once asked him to explain what deconstruction was, and he answered something like: all of my books are an attempt to answer that formidable question. Okay, I can even buy the point that there may be some inherent complexity not reducible to a one-paragraph answer, but saying "sorry, the answer is all my books, taken together" is not too useful of an answer. Surely there is an admittedly oversimplified answer that can give people some vague idea of the general gist of it? I mean, when people do pop-sci writups of astrophysics, they aren't exactly explaining astrophysics, but a simplified version of it (sometimes very simplified), which hopes only to give people an idea of the kind of thing that happens, not to actually teach them how to do it in all its complexity.

I think Derrida would've been much better off, in terms of intellectual legacy, if he had a student who took him somewhat less seriously on that point, perhaps even against his wishes. Say, someone who was willing to write even a fairly difficult and technical book, but in straightforward, fairly clear prose, attempting to explain at least a version of the main ideas Derrida's works dealt with. Instead, he got people who sort of pushed him in the opposite direction, Derrideans whose prose was somehow even "more Derridean" than his own, and who didn't really do much as far as explaining his ideas to anyone who didn't already buy them. Put differently, what difficult but possibly brilliant thinkers need are clear and convincing expositors, not also-difficult-yet-mediocre imitators.

michael_dorfman29• 16 years ago

You want to know the funny thing? He did exactly that.

One of Derrida's most prominent students, Geoff Bennington, wrote a book (with Derrida's approval and authorization) which attempted to summarize Derrida's work for the general reader. To make the game more interesting, he attempted to do so without directly quoting Derrida a single time. And, just to put a nice bow on it all, Derrida read the manuscript, and wrote a piece (which is published in the same volume) outlining briefly the parts of his philosophy he thought were excluded by Bennington's summary.

Robin_Message5• 16 years ago

> Deconstruction is not a method, and does not follow a formula, and pointing out the (numerous, outrageous) errors in this piece would take more time than I have.

If it doesn't have a method or a formula, could you instead tell us what deconstruction is? How can I tell it from a best-seller or the output of a Markov text generator?

Could you simply point out the most outrageous error in the text? Or just an outrageous error?

> I sympathize with the author's desire to make fun of that which he doesn't understand, but ultimately, it's a shallow game.

I reject your attempt to belittle the author by suggesting they are shallow. Your response is fallacious (telling us there are errors without pointing out what they are, ad hominem against the author) and, in claiming to "sympathise" with the author's supposed "desire to make fun", snobbish.

I try to be as civil on the internet as I am in real life. IRL, I'd say "Stop sneering and tell us something useful, or go away."

michael_dorfman29• 16 years ago

I tried in another posting to respond, but I'll take another crack at it here.

Here are a few outrageous errors, taken at random: "Deconstruction, in particular, is a fairly formulaic process" "points are awarded on the basis of style and wit rather than substance," "Decide what the text says. This can be whatever you want,"

I try to be as civil on the internet as I am in real life. IRL, I'd say "Stop sneering and tell us something useful, or go away."

The useful something I would tell you is: don't assume that people making fun of something actually understand what that something is. Furthermore, don't assume that just because something can't be easily explained in a blog post, it is nonsense. And finally, don't be surprised when people who take a complex discipline seriously are reluctant to engage with dismissive outsiders with an axe to grind and no real desire to engage. (My brother-in-law is a professor of Shakespeare at Cambridge, and you should see the look on his face when someone at a cocktail party raises the "authorship" issue...)

Arun20092• 16 years ago

Here's Chomsky on the same issue: http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/chomsky-on-postmodernis...

A quote:

"It's entirely possible that I'm simply missing something, or that I just lack the intellectual capacity to understand the profundities that have been unearthed in the past 20 years or so by Paris intellectuals and their followers. I'm perfectly open-minded about it, and have been for years, when similar charges have been made -- but without any answer to my questions. Again, they are simple and should be easy to answer, if there is an answer: if I'm missing something, then show me what it is, in terms I can understand. Of course, if it's all beyond my comprehension, which is possible, then I'm just a lost cause, and will be compelled to keep to things I do seem to be able to understand, and keep to association with the kinds of people who also seem to be interested in them and seem to understand them (which I'm perfectly happy to do, having no interest, now or ever, in the sectors of the intellectual culture that engage in these things, but apparently little else).

Since no one has succeeded in showing me what I'm missing, we're left with the second option: I'm just incapable of understanding. I'm certainly willing to grant that it may be true, though I'm afraid I'll have to remain suspicious, for what seem good reasons. There are lots of things I don't understand -- say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Kristeva, etc. --- even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat different from the rest --- write things that I also don't understand, but (1) and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of "theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out."

michael_dorfman29• 16 years ago

Again, they are simple and should be easy to answer, if there is an answer: if I'm missing something, then show me what it is, in terms I can understand.

This is a patently unfair test. Without a doubt, someone with infinite patience could take the time to explain all this to Chomsky-- but the fact that he lacks the inclination to actually study Continental Philosophy, and there aren't any volunteers willing to take the time to spoon-feed it to him isn't a reflection on the subject matter.

As an analogy: imagine if Paul McCartney said that someone should explain Perelman's proof of the Poincare Conjecture to him, and that if they couldn't, it meant that it was bunk.

three143• 16 years ago

I call strawman. It's not McCartney and Perelman, it's Chomsky and Continental Philosophy.

Arun20092• 16 years ago

> if Paul McCartney said that someone should explain Perelman's proof of the Poincare Conjecture to him, and that if they couldn't, it meant that it was bunk.

Sure, it's possible that Chomsky hasn't taken the time to truly understand Continental Philosophy or lacks the technical training to understand it even if someone were to explain it all to him.

But it's also possible that continental philosophy is just profound nonsense that thrives based on the following fallacy:

1. Profound stuff (general relativity, quantum mechanics, Poincare conjecture) is very often difficult to understand.

2. Continental philosophy is difficult to understand.

3. Hence, continental philosophy is profound stuff.

Frankly, applying the "looks like a duck, talks like a duck, walks like a duck" criteria, I feel it's more likely that continental philosophy doesn't qualify as a genuine area of human knowledge - it's all just nonsense. But it might serve some other important purpose (e.g., a form of harmless mental hashish that's genuinely pleasurable).

At any rate, pressure for greater clarity and simpler exposition is always good in any field.

shadowsun74• 16 years ago

The fact remains that somebody can explain Perelman's proof of the Poincare Conjecture to Paul McCartney, if McCartney was so interested.

Whereas you aren't likely to find people who're able to so explain deconstruction of something or the like in a manner that's clean and simple and easy to understand. This either suggest that a) the person doesn't understand it, fully, himself; or b) deconstruction/humanities is so difficult no human mind can fully understand it.

calibraxis• 16 years ago

Did you read Chomsky's full response at the provided link, rather than just the quoted snippet? If you have, do you disagree with his comments on Derrida's Grammatology, on Foucault's work, or his general comments on the other works he's at least tried to read? It appears he at least did some due diligence, and took the time to speak with some of the authors.

MaxMorlock• 16 years ago

It reminds me somehow of "Deconstructing My Car at the Detroit Airport" by Howard S. Schwartz. Originally published in "Organization Studies" 1993, Vol. 14, pp. 279-281. Link to the pdf of the publisher: http://oss.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/14/2/279 But it also found elsewhere, e.g.: http://nzmera.orconhosting.net.nz/deconstr.html

greenlblue2• 16 years ago

The lesson here is that intellectual inbreeding is a terrible and sad thing if you're an outside observer. All fields of academic study should once in a while be faced with outside scrutiny because without it the discipline optimizes cleverness instead of actual intellectual content.

powrtoch• 16 years ago

Of course, in a sense they are subject to this scrutiny. Humanities programs are very often the first ones proposed for the chopping block whenever budget cuts come around. At which time, I assume, they are forced to make appeals as to why they are too important to be slashed. Obviously I don't think these appeals involve explaining the workings of deconstruction to administrators, but presumably they are able to say something convincing enough to stay afloat.

In the end, it probably amounts to most people (very arguably for the better) being unwilling to declare something as bunk just because they don't personally understand it or see the merit.

I think the real test should be outside application. If the supposed advances made in some particular arm of literature can only have meaning, effect and influence within that closed literary community, then what can it really be doing for society as a whole? Ultimately we want a discipline to offer something to the world at large, not just to itself. You don't have to be a scientist to see the merit in studying the human heart, you just have to know (or just be able to conceive) someone with heart disease. And it's not just sciences that could withstand this test. If studying music theory helps people to write more beautiful songs, that will be apparent to many people who have no music training whatsoever.

Point being, I think the real acid test is outside application. I won't leap to the conclusion that deconstructionism is garbage. I just ask to be shown that understanding it does indeed help someone to do something other than write deconstruction papers.

dantheman• 16 years ago

The problem for application is in what time frame is it useful? In early biology just cataloging plants, bugs, and animals would be of little or no use to those not in those fields as all they were doing is developing taxonomies. The same might be said of those who started first watching the stars.

I think that Postmodernism may be a bit of a waste of time, but it's too early for me to know. Unfortunately they wish the public fund their work.

hubb• 16 years ago

i think deconstruction is more often classified as a post-structuralist technique[1]. it has similarities to post-modernism beyond the 'post', but it is different.

[1]barry's intro to critical theory http://books.google.com/books?id=SNy26bx7L5UC&printsec=f...

AndrewO• 16 years ago

Very interesting, although it seems odd to hear a software engineering describe Gödel's incompleteness theorems as a "cheap trick used to try to frighten mathematicians back in the thirties."

Still, I chuckled when I read it.

btilly3• 16 years ago

It wasn't exactly Gödel's incompleteness theorem that was being referred to. It was the use of self-reference to create a statement that can be neither true nor false.

Loy• 16 years ago

"Besides, there is no such way to gain admittance, or give defence to strange and absurd doctrines, as to guard them around about with legions of obscure, doubtful, and undefined words : wich yet make these retreats more like the dens of robbers, or holes of foxes, than the fortresses of fair warriors"

-- John Locke

alsomike• 16 years ago

I have been studying continental philosophy for a few years now, mostly Kant, Hegel, Lacan and Heidegger. I think it's extremely interesting and rewarding and I recommend it to anyone who doesn't feel intellectually challenged. I read a book about Maurice Merleau-Ponty that included excerpts of his writing in both English and French, and I thought that the French was much clearer, even with my limited knowledge of the language, and it made me want to improve my French and learn German so that I can better understand what they're saying.

So foreign language is another barrier to entry that hasn't been mentioned yet. There are English translations, but often they aren't very good. My process for engaging with a philosopher is an iterative, multi-pass process - I start with several introductory texts or a biography before (very slowly) tackling a main text. At that point, I usually have a good idea about where the argument is going, but only a thin grasp of how we got there, so I go through the material once or twice more. This is complicated by the fact that these ideas don't stand on their own, they are part of a tradition, and it's not really possible to take one thinker and find out what he or she thinks, because it's filled with references to others. It's just not possible to pick up a main text and read it in a weekend and expect to get anything out of it - it's more like a lifetime project, something you'd add to a "Things to accomplish before I die" list. If "Learn French or German" is on there too, you have a head start.

One practical benefit is that reading a difficult text is like running with weights on. It feels like you're flying when you read something easier. And if you're looking for critiques or refutations of postmodernism specifically, continental philosophy is much more interesting than this link. Ironically, it's somewhat self-refuting, since in trying to critique the postmodernists, it unknowingly adopts an important (although distorted) postmodern point: the role of discourse in the production of power and authority. Although, of course, the author uses this to assert the superiority of his preferred rationalist, technocratic regime of truth. In other words, the claim is that postmodernism is an imposter, a bullshit pretender to the throne that Engineering should rightfully occupy. Postmodernists, under the influence of Derrida and Foucault, would say that this claim is "logocentric", a code word which ultimately means patriarchal, racist, colonialist, homophobic, etc. The demand that "postmodernism" present itself as a single well-defined and unified idea would also be seen in this light, which is probably why no postmodernists are here to defend themselves. To them, it's boringly obvious that software engineering is philosophically rooted in patriarchy.

bitwize2• 16 years ago

This dawned on me the other day.

Michael Dorfman is right. Deconstruction is not a single method or mechanical process.

Deconstruction is perhaps best understood if you think of Derrida as an elaborate troll. It is a general strategy for trolling philosophers. All the biographies of Derrida I've read have used words like "playful" to describe him, like he's fucking Loki or something. He says "That work of Plato you're so fond of quoting doesn't really mean what you think it means!" and comes up with a convincing argument for why this is so. (The best trolls sound believable, even to those with well-trained and sensitive BS detectors.) It also explains why deconstruction can only be understood within the context of the philosophical tradition: trolling only works if it's tailored to the traditions and preconceptions of its audience.

The beautiful part is that philosophers who've been trolled are surreptitiously recruited into practicing the same trolling technique themselves.

How to Deconstruct Almost Anything, by a Software Engineer

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