"Deconstruct MAD," said Timothy Egan (NYT Online, July 14, 2010) about the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction. And he went on to show just what should be done. That may not worry most readers but it should worry a lot of English-speaking philosophers and their followers, like me. Egan is using "deconstruct" in a way that looks sensible! That word that we took to be just a Paris fad.
The main complaint was that it was superfluous. We already had "dismantle" and "disassemble" available to tell people to take something apart; all "deconstruct" did was add a little French spice. And there's where Egan snags us. From his pen the word means, "take it apart very carefully, with close attention to what went into its construction, including the intentions of those who constructed it." That's not spice, that's solid referential meaning, and we can't deny it.
Nor, if we attend to history, can we deny the source. Egan got that meaning from the despised Jacques Derrida, who under the name he coined, "deconstruction," carefully took apart Plato's Phaedrus, and gave his followers the model.
Why was Derrida despised? Because, in layman's terms, he was a Fancy Dan. Laughably so. When he analyzed a piece of fiction he would speak deeply of what he called its "double invagination," which meant "the verted reapplication of the outer edge to the inside of a form where the outside opens a pocket [and] comes to extend (or encroach on) the invagination of the lower edge."
If you giggle at that, layman, maybe you can understand why philosophers, after (in their way) giggling at it, and therefore despising, the author, are going to have a hard time giving him credit for a sensible coinage. Which they have to do, after reading Egan. There's no way out of it. He's a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist. And that's the Times he's writing in.
Might it be, though, that Egan is just one swallow, and there will be no summer for Derrida? Let's check the Times for the last twelve months.
Who would have guessed how many things are now being deconstructed. Patterned fabrics, police shootings, dance steps, Lorenz Hart's song lyrics, the first lady's outfit, blackface minstrelsy, sugar-laden breakfast food, the flavors of a salad, and conceptions of space and matter are all being given the treatment. And those are only the more plausible-sounding things. How do you deconstruct mother's milk, photosynthesis, an automobile, the living conditions of a fossil frog, and a Knicks' loss on the basketball court? Our Anglo analytic professors were right. The word's a continental sell.
When we get to "culinary deconstruction" we're sure of it. Those chefs who put the word on their menus (for a traditional dish broken down into its constituent parts) are using it only for its philosophical flavor. That's not serious usage.
But then we find a choreographer carefully breaking down a predecessor's work and criticizing it. That fits and it's serious. And there's nothing funny at all about a proposal to deconstruct a Congressional plan for national health spending. That's just what Egan wanted done with the State Department's policy of mutually assured destruction.
So the evidence is mixed. Maybe the best thing to do is imagine an occasion where we'd be happy to have the word in our vocabulary. How about the drafting of President Bush's State of the Union speech before the invasion of Iraq? "Axis of evil." Egan arrives at the conference and says, "Come on, deconstruct this." Would we like to have somebody there taking apart Bush's speech as carefully as Derrida took apart Plato's Phaedrus? If so we can be glad we hadn't gotten rid of "deconstruction."
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