In 1993, the software engineer Chip Morningstar published an essay called “How To Deconstruct Almost Anything.” In it, he surveys what he learned reading Jonathan Culler’s 1982 book On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism, which was a standard text at the time for people who want to do literary criticism.
Nowadays, he’d have had an easier time. I would recommend Peter Berry’s 1995 Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory or Lois Tyson’s 1998 Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide. Both are survey books, covering various different styles of criticism, including the New Criticism, structuralism, deconstruction (a rival of structuralism), New Historicism, and so on. Those are generally lumped together as “Theory,” not a great name in my opinion. Morningstar speaks of “postmodernism” and “deconstruction” rather interchangeably, which is wrong but unfortunately common. Postmodern criticism is a type of Theory that lives alongside deconstruction. You can think of Theory as the abstract superclass, and postmodernism and deconstruction as concrete subclasses. He’s got the inheritance hierarchy – and which properties belong to which class – all mixed up. It’s possibly also important that deconstruction and postmodernism were originally philosophical theories by actual philosophers that were later adopted by literary critics. Jacques Derrida the philosopher was doing the philosophy thing of being in dialogue with dead philosophers like Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Husserl, and his key writings assume you’ve already read those people. (And Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger are notoriously opaque, even for philosophers.) Culler tries to explain both the philosophy and its application, which makes for a tough read.
The critic is like the programmer. You can use just one approach (like deconstruction, or like Rust) for all your projects, but you’re better off if you can choose the tool you think most appropriate for the job. Morningstar suggests his reader try a deconstructive analysis of his (Morningstar’s) essay. That’s feasible, and I sketch it below, but to my mind structuralism is a better fit. In a later post, I’ll review Morningstar’s essay through that lens. That won’t have much about deconstruction – because I don’t think the essay is really about deconstruction – so I’ve extracted and modified the deconstruction content of my current draft. Here it is.
The summary
Morningstar writes:
“Deconstruction, in particular, is a fairly formulaic process that hardly merits the commotion that it has generated. However, like hack writers or television producers, academics will use a formula if it does the job.”
I roughly agree with this, though I would put it differently:
Deconstruction does lend itself to rote work following roughly the steps Morningstar describes in the essay. And American practitioners, Yale in particular, had a reputation of producing analyses of poems, say, that always ended the same way: in an “aporia,” which is, roughly, the shrug emoji translated into Greek. It’s easy to work toward the preordained conclusion that the meaning of the poem is indeterminate because everything is indeterminate. But:
Like programming and music, academia has its fads, and when a lot of people jump on a fad, bad work is done. That inevitability tells us nothing of the merits of what started the fad. As the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon famously said, “90% of everything is crud.”
As his example, Morningstar deconstructs a single sentence: “John F. Kennedy was not a homosexual.”
I judge Morningstar’s example to be part of the 90%. It doesn’t give a sense of what’s going on in the analyses that make up that other 10%. I’ll pick on one thing in particular:
A literary analysis (in the “close reading” style, of which deconstruction is a subset) convinces by providing evidence. An analogy might be to US procedure in civil trials, where juries are instructed to consider the “preponderance of the evidence” or “clear and convincing evidence” (depending on the type of case). What matters is the weight of evidence, which requires analysis of more than one sentence.
Nobody just ups and says “John F. Kennedy was not a homosexual” without any surrounding context, and a deconstruction is about what such sentences do in their context. Consider, first, an exposé of JFK’s mind-boggling horniness (which was known at the time, but not reported to the public). Next, consider an essay on his relationship to J. Edgar Hoover, then-director of the FBI and rumored homosexual. Now consider how the sentence “John F. Kennedy was not a homosexual” could land differently in the two contexts. In the first, the sentence after that one might be “Boy, he sure wasn’t!” In the second, it might be followed by: “Indeed, he had probably never knowingly met one, so he fell back on his Catholic upbringing and privately referred to Hoover as ‘that fairy sinner.'” The sentence means differently in different contexts. In the latter, it’s about consequences of growing up in a world where homosexuality was “the love that dare not speak its name.” In the former, it’s used as an intensifier to highlight JFK’s compulsive heterosexual behavior.
On Deconstruction contains a number of examples that Morningstar could have used instead of making one up. Putting one in his own (non-jargony) words would have taken up more space but been more helpful to the reader.
The essay
Deconstructing Morningstar’s essay according to his formula is pretty easy:
- The essay asserts a classic binary opposition between substance and style.
- It’s overt message is that substance is better, as are the people who focus on it.
- But the essay is full of stylistic tricks. [Exhaustive list goes here.]
- So the essay undermines itself by depending on that which it overtly marginalizes.
That analysis is crud, for two reasons.
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As a form of close reading, a real deconstruction would have an exhaustive-and-exhausting example-based argument that the essay really is depending on style while simultaneously scorning it. That would be pretty easy with Morningstar’s essay, which is heavily stylized.
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Theory is called Theory because its practitioners tend to “go meta.“ Old Lisper slogan: it’s more fun to write programs that write programs than it is to write programs. Often, the point of a piece is not so much to explicate the meaning of a poem or whatever, but to reflect on some more abstract questions. If I were aiming for something better than crud, I’d be meditating on how style shapes substance and if it’s really possible to draw a clear line between the two.
For example, Morningstar opened his conference talk with an example of gibberish that meant nothing. And yet that intro had an effect in the world. Can we really say it was without substance? It had causal power! Or perhaps its meaning was derived from its context and presentation? Or even the composition of its audience? This is edging into another subclass of Theory, reader-response criticism. As fox rather than a hedgehog, I’m OK with that. Derrida, I suspect, was a hedgehog, though less plodding than most, and with a wicked sense of humor. If so, what about other, less stylish and more “content-laden” texts? What about the Materials and Methods section of one of my wife’s papers? Probably around 30 years ago, I convinced my wife to write a scientific paper in the active voice. When she got the proofs back, the copy editor had changed every sentence back to the passive voice. Our marriage survived. And so on.
Anyway, isn’t the whole distinction kind of silly? There’s no way to write without any style. So is it really fair to criticize academics for “points [being] awarded on the basis of style and wit rather than substance” rather than considering what the style is accomplishing (or not)? Is this either/or distinction doing us any good?
No doubt that sketch of possible next steps is shallow, maybe sophomoric – crud, even – but it illustrates what a deconstructionist might be trying to do.
Try this at home
One of the three poems I know by heart is Robert Frost’s “Nature’s First Green Is Gold”:
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
I thought trying a deconstructive analysis of it would be pointless, but I actually surprised myself. I think about the poem a little differently now. Which I count as a win.
I plan to include that analysis in a podcast episode on deconstruction. An episode that seemed so simple – a good first episode after my long spell of writer’s block – but that has metastasized into two (maybe three) planned episodes, ten blog entries (not including this one), and a bunch of wiki pages as notes. It’s gotten completely out of hand.