Think it through
First, get comfortable – you’re planning to overthrow every preconceived idea
Start by closing the door. Derrida did all his work in a study at the top of his house full of thousands of books. (In one interview, he was asked if he had read them all. ‘No,’ he said, smiling, ‘only three or four. But I read those four really, really well.’) You might or might not have changed from your nightwear to daywear – Derrida often worked from the moment he woke, ascending to his office first thing, in his pyjamas (after a coffee, of course). You will also need a pipe, which you might choose to light. If not, you can still chew on it ruminatively.
Next, you need something to deconstruct
This can be anything. Fundamental to deconstruction is the idea that any text can be deconstructed. A poem. A railway timetable. A shopping list. Edmund Husserl’s Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy – First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology (1913). Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (2003). The Bible. The newspaper. This essay.
Or, if you’re feeling less ‘wordy’, you could watch something online. Or listen to the radio. A podcast. Put a glass to the wall and listen to the people next door talking. For Derrida, sitting there in his pyjamas, all of these ‘things’ are texts. All of them can be pulled apart in various ways. Each of them can be deconstructed.
Get deconstructing
How? Well, first, it can be useful to know how the text is regarded, the prevailing wisdom. For instance, society has ‘decided’ that Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Finding Nemo (2003) and Sleepless in Seattle (1993) are heart-warming films for the whole family. That The Waste Land (1922) is a difficult poem about the ‘human condition’. That the TV series Downton Abbey (2010-15) is the story of an England that used to be (and things were better then).
In Old Skool philosophical terms, this consensus is called the doxa (from where we get ‘orthodoxy’), and is contrasted with episteme, knowledge. Since Greek times (at least) the two have been in tension. To think deconstructively is to not only call into question accepted truths, but to ask in whose interests it is that they be accepted. These accepted truths might be benign – the result of lazy thinking or genuine consensus – but they can also be malignant.
So the first thing to do, as you light your pipe (or don’t light your pipe), is to think about why these texts are regarded this way, why this is the doxa. How ‘true’ is this assessment? Take the ‘human condition’ that The Waste Land seeks to explore. Whose human condition? Are the poem’s insights applicable across cultures? Genders? If not, why not? If they’re only partially applicable, then why partially, and what are the limits? And what do these limits tell us? The doxa is, for Derrida, only one interpretation, and its dominance is not necessarily because it’s somehow ‘truer’.
Take Downton Abbey. Please!
In fact, for Derrida, there’s no absolutely true assessment of a text, and the idea that one assessment is dominant can tell us more about the conditions around the text than the text itself. A text such as Downton Abbey is marketed as an exploration of a particular section of English history, and purports to tell it like it was. But any such exploration must carry within it any number of decisions about what to include or exclude. So the argument ‘this is how it was’ is false. It can be deconstructed.
For instance, the show has been praised for portraying not only the aristocracy, but the servant class. We follow their emotional journeys and melodramas as we follow those of their employers, and we are nudged to smile ruefully at how similar people are deep down, regardless of class. Both the aristocrats and the servants are mutually ‘humanised’ by this.
In fact, the relationship between the two classes was hugely exploitative. As the historian Margaret MacMillan has pointed out, servants in this era weren’t necessarily well clothed or fed, and in general were up at five in the morning and worked deep into the night. But this would be an inconvenient truth for a show that’s essentially ‘feel-good’. By reinforcing the humanness of the landed class and the, well, chattel class, the class system itself is seen as a product of chance, rather than a rigidly imposed structure of servility.
Also, is it any coincidence that this series, with its sympathetic portrayal of the aristocracy, has appeared at this moment in time? Again, whose interests might it suit? There’s a real culture war happening in the UK now, around such things as race, privilege, gender and Britishness. Is the production and popularity of a programme in which these issues aren’t moot part of that culture war? Is its very ‘escapism’ a reinforcement of threatened norms?
Look for contradictions
Next, look for places within the text that contradict each other, and where the spirit of the text is actually different, or even opposed to, what’s actually going on. Hollywood movies are great for this. For instance, we’ve become increasingly familiar with the idea of the ‘white saviour’ narrative. Films that purport to examine racial stereotypes, for instance, but then use those very same stereotypes to tell their story; they require a white protagonist to go on a ‘journey’ of understanding, with the oppressed characters becoming objectified in the exact same way as what the film purports to be critiquing. Whiteness is normality, to which otherness is explained. We’re trained not to notice this, but Derrida’s thinking attempts to train us to make it our focus – to look for tensions within a text, to see where the heavy lifting is being done.
Thinking like Derrida, then, means looking for these contradictions and exploring what they mean. Derrida himself did it with Karl Marx, in his book Specters of Marx (1993). Marxist thought privileges a materialist conception of being. It argues that everything, including our individual consciousnesses, can be explained by material things (labour, working conditions, class and so on). But Derrida, in his deconstruction, explores the persistence of the immaterial in Marx’s writing: of ghosts, phantoms and spectres. This is there in the first sentence of The Communist Manifesto (1848) – ‘A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of communism’ – but also in Marx’s use of imagery from William Shakespeare and his discussions of money, that invisible force moving like a ghost through society.
You’re reading against the grain
Derrida saw this kind of reading as reading against the grain. Take a text, find what it seems to advocate, and look in the opposite direction. G W F Hegel wrote about spirit, untainted by the mess of life – so Derrida explored his relationship to family. Husserl wrote about subjectivity by describing the surrounding world, so Derrida looked for moments where Husserl invoked God. This doesn’t eliminate the text or the thinking, but it problematises them, it finds the limits. In a sense, we’re to treat every text with suspicion, although Derrida himself called this an act of ‘hospitality’. To read a text this closely is to treat it with seriousness, to really look at what’s going on.
This reading against the grain can also be more subtle than just looking for the opposite. As all readings are interpretations, one is able to explore radically different ways into a text. What, we think as we light our second pipe, happens if we look at The Waste Land through queer theory? What role does race play in the Marvel movies? What are the economics of the Bible?
This has all made Derrida an influential thinker in areas such as feminism, postcolonial studies and queer theory. He calls on all of us to examine our most fundamental ideas, even those – especially those – that seem least open to question. Like Sigmund Freud and his idea of the repressed (and its return), for Derrida, our certainties are the sweet spot, the fissures in our beliefs and those of our culture. Our cultural biases are often least stable at precisely the points where we feel them to be most natural.
But this is anarchy…
Some critics have accused Derridean thinking of allowing for any interpretation or, worse still, of saying any interpretation is equally valid. The first is perhaps true, the second is not. Derrida was always clear that there were more effective and less effective ways of reading a text. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with analysing the novels of Leo Tolstoy through, say, modern dance. But the result is more likely to be ineffective or trivial. Some critics of Derrida and his followers have argued that this is precisely the sort of free-for-all that deconstruction leads to. But, ultimately, any philosophical idea pushed to its extreme allows for nonsense. Derrida would be – was – as appalled by the misuse and misunderstanding of his work as any of his critics. Far from being an anarchic process, Derrida called for a very close reading of the text at hand and, as with anything, the closer you look at something, the more fissures you see.
Don’t listen to what the author says
Finally – and, by now, it might be time to get dressed and have a spot of lunch – thinking like Derrida means trusting one’s own analysis of a text – even, or perhaps especially, if it contradicts the authors’ idea of what they’re doing. For Derrida, the author’s interpretation of her or his text is no more valid than the reader’s. Again, Freud is a useful reference point here. Patients in analysis reveals their truth not simply in the words they use, but in the words they don’t, in the stutters and repetitions, in the times they try to laugh things off, and when they contradict themselves. The ‘self’ being whole and coherent is an act of will. For Derrida, the ‘text’ being whole is the same.
