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Author’s note: This post does (at least in part) a “deconstructive reading” of an essay that critiques deconstruction. To preempt a valid objection: yes, I’ve devoted a lot of effort to an essay that was probably never intended to be a well-honed, final statement, robust against all attacks.

I’m doing it nevertheless because I have this idea that the style or methods of deconstruction might be useful to the audience of the “Oddly Influenced” podcast. Deconstruction can be seen as a bug-finding technique, and Lord knows we need all the help we can get finding bugs in code, designs, user documentation, etc. And maybe especially in what used to be called “upstream documentation”: the formal documents or informal understandings about what it is we’re trying to do with software.

⊕ My notes

But the podcast episodes I’m working on can – due to the nature of the medium – only contain short or partial examples. Expecting my listeners to make the jump from those to design reviews would be rude. I needed to provide an extended example. The ones in the academic literature seem too foreign to my audience – they presume a lot of background knowledge uncommon in software people. Deconstructing an essay whose audience is roughly the same as mine might, I thought, be both interesting and useful. Hence this post.

I was surprised by how engaging working on this example was. Deconstructionists will often say “the text deconstructs [or undermines] itself”, and it really felt that way: Things kept leaping out of the text, saying “don’t forget to notice me!” It was something like being really in the groove as an exploratory tester: you can’t turn around without noticing another bug. It was weird.

So, while I never regard anything as the One True Way, I suspect more than before that deconstruction might be a helpful part of the toolbox.

Reader note: When I quote from the essay I will occasionally highlight words or phrases. In all cases, this is my emphasis; it’s not from the original text.

In 1993, the software engineer Chip Morningstar published an essay called “How To Deconstruct Almost Anything”. You should read it now.

Content

The essay lives up to its billing, as it describes the “formulaic process” of deconstruction in a way that a reader could indeed follow to deconstruct anything: ⊕ I don’t know why “almost” is in the title. There’s nothing about the implied limitation in the essay.

“Step 1 – Select a work to be deconstructed. […]

Step 2 – Decide what the text says. […]

Step 3 – Identify within the reading a distinction of some sort. […] It is a convention of the genre to choose a duality, such as man/woman, good/evil, earth/sky, chocolate/vanilla, etc. […]

Step 4 – Convert your chosen distinction into a ‘hierarchical opposition’ by asserting that the text claims or presumes a particular primacy, superiority, privilege or importance to one side or the other of the distinction. […]

Step 5 – Derive another reading of the text, one in which it is interpreted as referring to itself. In particular, find a way to read it as a statement which contradicts or undermines either the original reading or the ordering of the hierarchical opposition (which amounts to the same thing). This is really the tricky part and is the key to the whole exercise. […]”

That captures the mechanics of deconstruction, especially as it was used in American literary criticism (notably the school centered around Paul de Man at Yale from 1971 until his death in 1983). Morningstar describes this process as having some value:

“[T]here is indeed some content, much of it interesting. […] [There] are a set of important and interesting ideas: that in reading a work it is illuminating to consider the contrast between what is said and what is not said, between what is explicit and what is assumed, and that popular notions of truth and value depend to a disturbingly high degree on the reader’s credulity and willingness to accept the text’s own claims as to its validity.”

Goal shift

Morningstar’s essay is not, however – despite the title – much about deconstruction. It is instead about deconstructionists sssss. It aims to show that they are bad or corrupted people, to name what they do that is bad, and to diagnose how their environment has shaped them into badness – and why the environment around Morningstar (and intended audience) has and will prevent them from being similarly corrupted. The audience needn’t exercise virtue; they are exercised into virtue by their commercial environment:

“technical people like me work in a commercial environment.”

“The constraints of the physical world and the actual needs and wants of the actual population have provided a grounding that is difficult to dodge.”

It is that lack of an external customer that allowed bad practices and bad people:

Decisions about their career advancement, tenure, promotion, and so on are made by committees of their fellows. They are supervised by deans and other academic officials who themselves used to be professors of Literature or History or Cultural Studies.

The end of the essay expands further in somewhat of a call to arms (about which, more later).

The easy hierarchy

The essay’s animating binary opposition is:

form over substance

rhetoric over content

style over content

His objection to the humanities is that they depend on “clever handwaving and artful verbiage.” He describes revising a talk because “we wanted people to get upset about the actual content [content = good] rather than the form in which it was presented [form = bad].” In the humanities, “points are awarded on the basis of style and wit rather than substance.” “You get maximum style points for being French. […] It is difficult for even the most intense and unprincipled Note the flat statement that academics tend toward the morally bad. The purpose of the essay is about diagnosing this than demonstrating it. (There are no quotations or examples, save Morninstar’s own.) Why are they that way? What are they up to? American academician writing in French to match the zen obliqueness of a native French literary critic.”

The opening anecdote

He compares the humanities talks he heard at the Second International Conference on Cyberspace I haven’t found its exact date. It must be between the first conference (sometime in 1990) and a conference report from Randy Farmer and others in April 1991. to dream [il]logic:

Are you familiar with the experience of having memories of your dreams fade within a few minutes of waking? It was like that, and I think for much the same reason. Dreams have a logic and structure all their own, falling apart into unmemorable pieces that make no sense when subjected to the scrutiny of the conscious mind.

The things they said were largely incomprehensible. There was much talk about deconstruction and signifiers and arguments about whether cyberspace was or was not “narrative”. There was much quotation from Baudrillard, Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Saussure, and the like, every single word of which was impenetrable.

The next day, Morningstar plays a trick on yesterday’s speakers and the people who (think they) understood them. He opens his presentation by reciting 69 words of “nonsense” explicitly and intentionally empty of content. (“Since we had no idea what any of [the day’s presentations] meant (or even if [they] actually meant anything at all), I simply cut-and-pasted from my notes.")

Leave aside what that was supposed to accomplish at the conference: what is the anecdote supposed to accomplish in this essay? Here are three ends of anecdotes that seem similar:

The lord flew into a rage. He turned bright red and shrieked and yelled and cursed. ‘Get out of my house, you fool!’ he shouted.

The peasant looked him steadily in the eye and replied, ‘I am not a fool, my lord. I’ve had an excellent meal and a good laugh at your expense. What’s more, I’ve won three sacks of wheat and two bullocks from my friends. A fool could not have done all that.’ And he walked out of the lord’s house, a big grin on his face. (“The Clever Peasant”)

… and:

When the Devil came, he found nothing but the stubble, and went away in a fury down into a cleft in the rocks. “That is the way to cheat the Devil,” said the peasant, and went and fetched away the treasure. (“The Peasant and the Devil”)

… and:

At first, various people started nodding their heads in nods of profound understanding, though you could see that their brain cells were beginning to strain a little. Then some of the techies in the back of the room began to giggle. By the time I finished, unable to get through the last line with a straight face, the entire room was on the floor in hysterics, as by then even the most obtuse English professor had caught on to the joke.

Why would an essay about how bad it is to win based on “style and wit rather than substance” start with a first person anecdote of someone winning based on a stylish and witty prank? Doesn’t this act to undermine the argument? The way deconstructionists are always saying texts do?

The odyssey

The essay is a story, with a main character, “Chip Morningstar”, who is recounting his adventures. It says that right there in the subtitle:

“My Postmodern Adventure”

We have here an old old story structure, Here I’m gesturing toward structuralism, a style of analysis that preceded deconstruction and was, some think, destroyed by it. Rhetorically, though, structuralists can be lumped together with the other “postmodernists”. They certainly talk endlessly about “signifiers” and take familiarity with Saussure as a given. So they would fit Morningstar’s complaint: “There was much talk about deconstruction and signifiers […]. There was much quotation from Baudrillard, Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Saussure, and the like, every single word of which was impenetrable.” that of the hero’s journey, subtypes “the trickster warrior,” and “told in the first person.” Odysseus and the Odyssey are probably the most well-known example for cultures downstream of the Greeks:

I am Odysseus son of Laertes, renowned among mankind for all manner of subtlety [cleverness], so that my fame ascends to heaven. (Book 9)

Odysseus’s status as a clever trickster (and more) was established in Book 8 when the blind singer Demodocus tells the story of the Trojan Horse (which was Odysseus' idea). That leads to him revealing his name and starting the first-person part of the story.

So both Odysseus and Morningstar are ready to tell the rest of their story in the first person.

Odysseus meets the Lotus Eaters, and saves the day by dragging his less-wise shipmates back to the ship. He tricks the Cyclops into drunkenness and finds a way to disguise his men by hiding under sheeps' bellies. (An echo of the Trojan Horse?) He receives two setbacks when (1) his men stupidly open the bag of winds a god gave Odysseus, and (2) a bunch of giants sink all but one of his ships. He bounces back when his display of courage and determination cause the witch Circe to fall in love with him and reverse her earlier decision to turn a chunk of the one remaining ship’s crew into pigs. And so on.

Morningstar has his own series of difficulties to overcome. As any hero will, he’ll get a bit of guidance or help from various figures along the way. A “person with a foot in the lit crit camp but also a person of clear intellectual integrity” recommends Culler’s On Deconstruction. That’s a tough early challenge:

I got the book and read it. It was a stretch, but I found I could work my way through it, although I did end up with the most heavily marked up book in my library by the time I was done.

The metaphor Learning is a voyage kicks in and he encounters more waypoints and successfully meets more people with foreign ideas:

The Culler book lead me to some other things, which I also read. And I started subscribing to alt.postmodern and now actually find it interesting, much of the time.

Morningstar has achieved sufficient competence to complete his voyage. (Like Odysseus the fighter, tactician, lover, and trickster, he is not the best at any one thing, but he is good enough at everything important. In software jargon, he’s a generalizing specialist or T-shaped person.

That’s perhaps too much point-by-point comparing, but the subtitle is asking for it.

The more important question is, still: what function does the hero’s journey serve? Two:

• When a character in a story is portrayed positively, the reader is more inclined to believe what the character says than if the same proposition is made in a blunt “just the facts, ma’am” style. Now I’m doing reader-response criticism, another of the constellation of “postmodern” techniques. It is a rhetorical or persuasive device.

• A hero is a leader. His words predispose the reader to thrill to a “we few, we happy few, we band of brothers” rousing speech. It primes the reader for further rhetoric in the form of a call to action. Hero’s journeys don’t necessarily end with “and then they lived happily ever after.” The hero might die, leaving others to carry on the good fight. Moses did not live to reach the Promised Land. Arthur and Barbarossa will return when there’s need.

This essay matches the structure:

It is clear to me that the humanities are not going to emerge from the jungle on their own. I think that the task of outreach is left to those of us who retain some connection, however tenuous, to what we laughingly call reality. We have to go into the jungle after them and rescue what we can. Just remember to hang on to your sense of humor and don’t let them intimidate you.

More on this later. First, though, let’s trudge through the hoary deconstruction trope of asking what the text about style vs. content says about its own style and content.

Standards of evidence

The only example is what Morningstar says.