Deconstruction

How to …

John Phillips

Let’s settle on some provisional definitions.

Text

Text would be whatever bears the trace of something it is not—even, or especially,

when the something it is not is “itself,” as we see with the letter “a.” The letter “a”
bears the trace of something it is not by virtue of its repeatability [a = a] which allows
it to differ from itself to thus appear and reappear in widely differing contexts. The
point is that all texts share this basic and minimal condition: they must be able to be
repeated and to thus differ from themselves. They bear the trace of their own
difference. See my explanation of The Mark.

Context Undecidable

Derrida’s notorious statement, “There is nothing outside of the text,” which he makes
as part of an exhaustively contextual reading of the French philosopher/writer
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (from Of Grammatology) has often been cited, out of context,
by people wanting to criticize Derrida for saying that there is no reality beyond the
written words of a book. It is in effect a trap because the moment a writer takes the
phrase out of context he proves it. What it means, in its context, is that, when we
read a text there are nothing but contexts. The relationship between a text and its
(incessantly changing) contexts cannot be absolutely separated from the text itself. To
render coherent our sense of the relationship between texts and contexts, we must
choose one or other of two mutually exclusive conclusions: either there are only
contexts; or there is no context (only texts). To choose one or the other is to render
the whole situation untenable so we have to somehow hold onto both. This situation is
undecidable and you can see it at work in a similar, though different, way with
Derrida’s “two interpretations of interpretation” from “Structure, Sign and Play.”

Enunciation

The speaker or writer of a text is always in principle absent from it but not ever
entirely. The enunciation denotes the trace of the one who speaks. If someone
speaks or has written then someone else (even the same person) is perhaps listening
or reading. This perhaps is a permanent and inexhaustible possibility. If I am reading
a text there’s little I can do to finish off its enunciative potential. As history teaches
us, though, I might do my best to finish it off. I could kill the messenger or burn the
letter. Acts of this kind (which are as real or as dramatic as anything—most
Shakespeare plays turn on moments where letters are diverted) reveal the insistent
power of the trace.

The powers of enunciation can be made evident wherever the pronouns appear (I,
you, we, but also he, she, it, they, and “one”). They do not need to appear in order for
us to work with an enunciative phenomenon: the non-appearance of pronouns marks

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us to work with an enunciative phenomenon: the non-appearance of pronouns marks
the enunciative dimension no less. But where they do appear we have a head start.
They mark an absence of a specific kind. The lyric “I” is an a priori absence (which
means that there was no referent for the “I” present before the “I” that marks its
absence was inscribed). The poet does not mean “I the poet” when he or she writes
“I wandered lonely as a cloud.” Rather he invents a persona present only in the
timeless word. We might qualify this “timeless”: nothing is “without time” or “outside
time” except if it’s in a mythical eternity, that is, in the mythical itself. But what is it
that makes the thought of this mythical “timelessness” possible? That would be the
trace, which jumps unrestricted to illimitable heresand nows as yet undreamed of.

Thematic Content

We are taught to recognize the thematic content of texts. However, when one is
reading at the level of the trace, thematic content no longer remains viable. The trace
makes thematic content possible but the moment we say “this stands for this” or “this
means this” we have activated a possibility by stopping up others and, in a
fundamental way, blocking off our access to the openness of the trace itself. So
thematic content is always possible and there’s no reason to deny it as such but a
particular theme cannot be the basis for a critical reading (if we accept the principle of
possibility that the trace designates).

Structure

All of the above would lead us to assume that the basic structure of a text that we are
reading (and the event of our reading it) involves in some basic and provisional way
“being between.” The text (which is already anyway something between text and
context) is always, without determination, between writer and reader (this is what a
writer would try to determine and there exist a plethora of resources at a skilled
writer’s command that allows him or her to determine the ways in which his or her text
is understood: these skills are gathered under the single rubric, rhetoric). The reader
too tries to determine the text (and the plethora of skills on this side—the critical
resources of standard critical readings—add up to a general hermeneutics). The
being-between of a text succumbs, of course, but never absolutely, to the various
determinations that help to construct it (by writers and readers).

Deconstruction, on the contrary, concerns the relationship between these determined

aspects (meanings, intentions) and those aspects of a text that are not in the control
of writers or readers. We can sum this up: trace. The trace would be the mark of a
text that remains between even when all appears to be said and done: the trace
combines the text’s “already no longer” and its “not yet.” These two phrases are
closest thing we’ll find in deconstruction to proper technical terms: already no longer
and not yet. Learn them by heart.

Interval

The trace structures the text in terms of the interval between the mark(s) and
whatever the mark(s) bear the traces of (including themselves and their differences
but also including nothing). Interval: the difference in space, in time, between space
and time, grapheme, phoneme, signifier, signified, identity, difference: différance. We

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and time, grapheme, phoneme, signifier, signified, identity, difference: différance. We
can cancel intervals, don’t worry. All we have to do is determine the meaning of the
written text. We might become better readers, though, by acknowledging that this
“interval” never actually can be cancelled out entirely (because it makes
readingpossible). It can be ignored, forgotten, relegated, domesticated, excluded,
named (people at different times have used the following names for it: writing,
woman, God); but it will not simply go away. Something of it always remains.

Deconstruction: Procedures

These definitions or principles constitute the grounds of deconstruction.

Deconstruction names them in fact. But we should note that the trace, enunciation,
interval, structure, etc. have no solid grounds of their own. They are, indeed, strictly
groundless (for all the reasons examined above). Deconstruction moves on groundless
grounds? That’s correct. It isn’t complicated but it does require an eye for what cannot
be seen: the between-ness (to write like a translator of Heidegger) of the between!

Now we have cleared the grounds we can move on to procedures. Procedures: how to
do it, in other words. Doing deconstruction (as the introductions I recommend
laboriously rehearse) cannot be regarded as an activity involving merely the
application of a positive method or in terms simply of techniques. As far as methods
or techniques are concerned, we’ve got plenty of those gathered over thousands of
years in the histories of rhetoric, hermeneutics, aesthetics and critical reading. We
already know some techniques: we won’t waste them. All we have to add, in that
respect, would be an eye for the trace, the interval, the structurality of a structure, the
enunciation, etc.

We can now allow things to become just a little more complex.

It follows from the above that the trace, as we’ve called it, after Derrida, will not ever
be absent from the sources, the grounds, the origins, meanings and structures of
anything in the business of the species (homo sapiens), wherever that business may
be encountered. It’s a grand claim but made on actually very humble grounds. What
could be more humble than a mark of absence and insignificance? The mark of
absence will never actually be absent wherever this business is carried out. It ought to
be fairly obvious that no one has the disciplinary authority to be regarded as the
scholar of everything! But two disciplines exist that have the range implied by this.
Not, as we have been led to think, the hardest of the hard sciences, physics, whose
aspirations are to provide knowledge of everything (but actually tell us little of what
often most concerns people). But philosophy (previously “metaphysics”) and literature
each in different ways seems to cover the wide spectrum of human concerns: life and
death, desire and relations, identity, values, rights and wrongs, triumph, disaster, love,
knowledge, right down to the minute moments of reflection: on a beautiful thing, a
curious thought, an unlikely comparison. The one searches for truth (philosophy was
born as a kind of love [Philo] combined with wisdom [Sophia]) while the other
explores, through the endless resources of rhetoric, the multiplicity of feelings, thought
and things. We’ll be interested in the between of these two noble pursuits.

These two disciplines are—despite events that dispute this—intimately tied up not only
with each other, but also with the historical development of the species (the species,

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with each other, but also with the historical development of the species (the species,
so far as we can tell, is historical by nature in so far as none of us can exist outside the
history that informs our consciousnesses). There’s no need to assume that we really
understand the meaning of history. Common sense and education have built for us a
sense but we don’t have to rest on that. On the contrary, history is structured in
determinate ways and so functions on the basis of the indeterminate trace(it’s for this
reason too that historical revision constantly wages a critical war with established
history). We do know that development is overdetermined, complex and not always
what we’d have wanted it to be. As often as not progress looks like an unfortunate
regression to unwelcome earlier ways or, worse, a falling away from earlier values into
something unknown but colder, harder, more cruel. (No one writes iambic pentameter
like Milton these days). Nevertheless I think we’d all like to believe that the species
can develop and that the development of our sense of what and how we can know,
behave, and evaluate should be a part of that. With deconstruction, then, literature
and philosophy, and the inevitable tensions between them, often serve to delimit the
disciplinary space of enquiry. These are disciplines that do not rule out the possibility
that ancient knowledge and understanding can be transformed into means of engaging
with the present and developing into the future.

Techniques of Transformation

A critical reading should, by interpretation, be able to transform the thing that it

interprets. This is what we may call a performative interpretation. That is the aim of
the procedures of deconstruction. The terms of deconstruction simply designate
necessary conditions of deconstruction (trace, enunciation, structurality). The
procedures of deconstruction would thus raise these necessary conditions to a level of
sufficiency. (I’m going to have a problem with this in a minute so don’t take it too
much to heart).

The trace, as we have said, brings the usual terms of our understanding (i.e., the
differences between writer and reader, text and context, word and meaning, signifier
and signified, etc.) to a state of undecidability. The problem here is that without these
opposing terms (without, for instance, the difference between a signifier and a
signified) we’d have no sense—we’d not have been brought to an understanding—of
the peculiar nature of the mark and its difference from itself in its repetition. We have
to keep the signifier dancing with its darling the signified (or fighting it or slapping its
face or fixing the brakes on its car) in order for the trace to appear as such (though it
is certainly neither signifier or signified). If this sounds unnecessarily melodramatic
then just drop the unnecessarybecause the historicity of these terms can be grasped
without exaggeration as a great unfolding drama: a soap opera. A performative
interpretation would be nothing less than an interpretation that brings out the
performative force of the text: or better, puts the text that it interprets into the
performance that it always anyway was. Derrida’s interpretation of metaphysics lets it
unroll as an endless yet amusing and fascinating soap opera, without which—and
without letting it be such—we’d never have got an inkling of the trace.

(So there’s going to be a minor problem thinking trace as the necessary, and the
performative interpretation as bringing it up to sufficiency, for without the performative
there’d be no trace and vice versa. However, they’ve served their purpose: let them
dance a while).

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Anyway, let’s get down to business:

Performative Interpretation

Louis Althusser, you might remember, gives us a performative interpretation of Marx.

This is the immediate result of Althusser’s discovery that Marx himself had put into
something like a theatrical performance the concepts of Hegel and traditional political
economy. This is how he puts it in Reading Capital:

Perhaps … it is not impermissible to think that if Marx does “play” so much with
Hegelian formulae in certain passages, the game is not just raffishness or sarcasm but
the action of a real drama, in which old concepts desperately play the part of
something absent which is nameless, in order to call it onto the stage in
person—whereas they only “produce” its presence in their failures, in the dislocation
between the characters and their roles (29).

The suggestion here is that Marx’s use of Hegelian terms and formulae in Das Capital,
which seem “sarcastic” and “raffish” (especially if we assume that Marx is supposed to
have brought about acritique of Hegel), actually puts them into play as if they were
characters on a stage. Remember that Althusser claims that Marx’s critique is based
upon a lingering absence of ground for political economy, which is filled by the
mythical ideal of human needs. The failure to produce the presence of the hidden
essence of the human perhaps tells us more about this essence—especially if that
failure is regarded as a kind of theatre. There is more than a small hint here that
Althusser has been paying close attention to the work of his younger friend and former
colleague Jacques Derrida—especially with this notion of play. More to the point,
though, is this sense of the “something absent which is nameless” (Derrida talks of a
similar situation in his reading of Levi-Strauss with reference to the “something
missing from the field of the finite”). The something absent, the something missing,
the nameless, the unnamable: here we have a crux of problems that, again, we have
learned to address as that of the trace (or différance). If we now learn to read our
several and various traditions (no matter which discipline we believe we belong to) as
dramas in which “old concepts” play the part of “something absent which is nameless,”
we might find that this drama is the drama, in fact, each and every time, of the
nameless and absent trace. It will not, therefore, be necessary to replace the old
concepts with new ones. Two strategies are available:

1. Paleonymics

Derrida begins to introduce this word into his work in1972. It is his invention. By a
characteristic inverse irony, then, the new word paleonymy comes to designate a
certain operation according to which one continues to put old words to work. By that
time the (old) word deconstruction had caught on but Derrida seems intent in
introducing this alternative alongside it, a kind of repetition with a difference. It’s the
risk laden use of old terms that he focuses on in the opening section of Dissemination,
his “book” of 1972 (which contains the acknowledged “great” readings of Plato and
Mallarmé). The “opening section,” called in the English translation “Outwork” (from
the French “Hors livre,” literally “out [or outside the] book”) is not quite a preface; but
it focuses for its subject matter on the problem of pre-faces. (We could argue—and

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it focuses for its subject matter on the problem of pre-faces. (We could argue—and
I’m certain that this is the intention—that it plays the role of a preface in the theatrical
sense). The old word—in the sense that Derrida is concerned to demonstrate—plays a
role that mobilizes what he calls the “structure of the double mark” (we’ve talked
about the structure of the mark and its difference from itself in its repetition):

Caught—both seized and entangled—in a binary opposition, one of the terms retains
its old name so as to destroy the opposition to which it no longer quite belongs, to
which in any event it has never quite yielded, the history of this opposition being one
of incessant struggles generative of hierarchical configurations. (Dissemination 4).

The opposition between speech and writing, and that between the signified and the
signifier, have both, by this time, undergone considerable deconstruction. Writing,
once the name for the little inscriptions that were always supposed to have
represented spoken words symbolically, now designates the basic conditions that
underlie the entire field of meaning and (tele-) communication (all communication is
already tele!). When one speaks, one performs a kind of writing. The hierarchy
generated by the opposition has crumbled. One can no longer put speech ahead of
writing; or the presence of my meaning ahead of its representation in words. Writing,
in other words, is an old word with a new significance. It now stands in—amongst
several other terms—for that which is absent and has no name: trace. “Trace,” of
course, is an old word too. To reread the texts of 1967, particularly, is to witness the
theatre of this agonistic couple (speech and writing) fighting it out, desperately trying
to name something absent. The important thing to remember about these old words
with new roles to play is that they do not themselves escape “the double mark” effect
but, rather, they mobilize it:

The rule according to which every concept necessarily receives two similar marks—a
repetition without identity—one mark inside and the other outside the deconstructed
system, should give rise to a double reading and a double writing. (4).

Writing both names the little inscriptions that represent words but it also marks the
absolute nameless “outside” of the system without which there’d be no words to
represent. It names and marks at the same time. To recap, paleonymy is a new name
for old words (like writing) that operate both inside and outside the system to which
they problematically belong. There would, of course, be no paleonymics without the
mobilization of these problematic old words, so it’s not a matter simply of refuting or
denying the senses given to them by the tradition. These are exactly the senses that
help the work of paleonymy along (which “critiques, deconstructs, wrenches apart the
traditional, hierarchical opposition” (4)). Derrida also acknowledges the “risk” involved
in paleonymics: “the risk of settling down or of regressing into the system that has
been, or is in the process of being, deconstructed” (5). One must therefore
acknowledge the risk: “to deny this risk would be to confirm it: it would be to see the
signifier—in this case the name—as a merely circumstantial, conventional occurrence
of the concept or as a concession without any specific effect” (5). The risk of using
an old name is that one might be accused of simply playing with language, substituting
synonyms. If an old name is really to “designate something absent that is nameless”
(in Althusser’s evocative phrase) it must do so as part of the system (always a given
historical hierarchy of forces) to which it must be located and for which reason it has
the power to force open. Writing works for Derrida as a forceful lever in the logic of

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paleonymics because the opposition to which it belongs constitutes “a dissymmetric,
hierarchically ordered space whose closure is constantly being traversed by the forces,
and worked by the exteriority, that it represses: that is, expels and, which amounts to
the same, internalizes as one of its moments” (5). The old word, then, has been
articulated by a system of oppositions as belonging to it but in fact tends to
designate—in moments of tension and struggle—moments that cannot in fact be
contained by that system. Against this, to cling (as one might cling to a fetish) to the
old word—especially if it has now gained some transgressive force (and don’t forget
that transgressive force is always fashionable)—might simply be to confirm the
opposition once again but in reverse, championing now the autonomy of the
signifier—or the materiality of the mark—in the belief that one has critiqued the
previous hierarchy out of existence simply by overturning it.

2. Neologistics

The word neologism, on the other hand, is an “old word” that designates the invention
of new ones. Paleonymy is a neologism created, by analogy I suppose, with words like
paleology (the study of antiquities; the study of the ancient past, especially of human
culture and its artifacts; archaeology) or paleography (the study of ancient writing and
inscriptions; the science or art of deciphering and interpreting historical manuscripts
and writing systems) and words like metonymy and synonym. The neologism is
suggestive of a rhetorical term: paleonym or paleonymy. This is another way,
certainly, of working with old names, but it also gives more definite notice that
something beyond the old logic, or the current logic, is intended. Popular neologisms
in Derrida’soeuvre include artifactuality, archi-écriture (the French resonates with
architecture but signifies “proto-writing,” which is thus distinguished from the
paleonym “writing” but means the same thing) and phallogocentrism.

There is no excuse, now we’ve been through all of this, for assuming that these words
(old or new) simply signify some actual or simple sense or reference that one could
confidently call up every time we used the name (like I can when I call my dog: “here
lassie!”). They play the role of something absent that is nameless within a system of
oppositions that cannot contain or control it. Theyperform deconstruction and serve
performative interpretation.

Non-Synonymous Substitutions

The paleonymies and neologisms that Derrida from time to time puts to work in the
service of his critical readings form something like a chain. The logic of deconstruction
allows substitution, of course, because substitution is one of its basic principles. One
could probably show that deconstruction simply names the possibility of substitution
(and thus that substitution was all there was, everywhere and always). But
substitution is a bit like representation: I send my lawyer as my representative and
also as my substitute; I can substitute a beautiful prostitute for my wife when she’s
away on business (though I wouldn’t, of course); psychoanalysis sometimes suggests
that our partners in adult life are substitutes for idealized versions of parents. A
substitute is something thatstands in for something. In the traditional system of
oppositions (the one that we are most familiar with) the substitute is opposed as a kind
of contingency measure to that for which it from time to time acts as substitute. An
actor substitutes him or herself for a real or fictional person (someone that the actor in

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actor substitutes him or herself for a real or fictional person (someone that the actor in
point of fact is not). The real or fictional person is considered primary and the actor
secondary: the substitute must play the role of representative and must thus repress
or exclude their own “presence,” falsifying it so that it appears as some other
presence. There are interesting alternatives: in Brechtian drama, for instance, the
actors must appear to be acting. You can watch your own Brechtian drama by
focusing, when watching television dramas, on what the actors as actors are doing.
Then work outwards from there (looking at setting, screenplay and direction) and
you’ll have a better sense of how the illusion and thus the naturalization of reality is
produced. This is what Brecht—in his Marxist approach to theatre—advocates:

Brechtian Drama

Brecht demanded that his actors not empathize entirely with their characters;
instead they were to indicate their behaviour as if from outside the character. So
it is said that Brechtian acting goes further than the Stanislavsky system of
acting, where an actor identifies with their character. Brechtian drama implies a
more demonstrative method that enables the actor to show the character from
several perspectives.

If Brecht’s Marxism leads him to formulate a theatre that addresses the politically and
historically constructed character of social relations then deconstruction goes at least
one step further. The substitutions of deconstruction have nothing to stand in for that
was ever simply present or absent. They stand in for the conditions of possibility for
substitution itself—without ever standing outside those conditions. The paleonymies
and neologisms (e.g., trace, différance, hymen, deconstruction, pharmakon) do the
work of metaphysical terms but without ever becoming metaphysical (i.e., without ever
becoming transcendental). They operate within a logic (according to which the mark
differs from itself in its repetition) that each time affects the system to which it now
only somewhat belongs. The substitutions are not synonymous. They cannot be used
as names as if for the same thing: the trace only ever functions within a context that
it, at the same time, subverts. They can be substituted for each other, as having
equivalent or comparable effects in different contexts, but they do not operate as
names. For what they stand in for is both absent and nameless: the standing in for
itself, or substitutability. Old names can be substituted for by neologisms and vice
versa but synonymy actually disappears in the process.

There is a biological definition that seems to have adopted Derrida’s term:

Nonsynonymous Substitution. Those of you who study biology and genetics will see
(the rest might just take our word for it) that Derrida’s formulations of the 1960s were
prescient with regard to the later understanding of DNA (which is of course no less a
kind of writing than Bleak House by Charles Dickens). A non-synonymous substitution
marks the point where something has been transformed, while a synonymous
substitution marks only a limited alteration that changes nothing in any essential way.
It is somewhat sobering to realize that Derrida’s investigations (or if you prefer—as I
do—performative interpretations) of ancient texts arrived at discoveries that the

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do—performative interpretations) of ancient texts arrived at discoveries that the
cutting edge of genetic science would arrive at only much later. The difference is this:
science often intends a discrete objectivity (science itself doesn’t change—its content
grows in depth and multiplies in number) while Derrida intends his own writing to be
implicated deeply in the processes he is attempting to interpret.