What are they Thinking?: Understanding the Mind and Values of the Woke – Part 4 Deconstruction and Postmodernism
Taking apart discourse to unmask power
The first post in this series: “What are they Thinking?: Understanding the Mind and Values of the Woke – Part 1 Living in ‘Escher’s World’” addressed how the contemporary Social Justice movement arose out of the convergence of Neo-Marxism and Postmodernism. The second post, “What are they Thinking?: Understanding the Mind and Values of the Woke – Part 2 The Failure and Reinvention of Marxism” looked at the transition that took place from classic Marxism to Neo-Marxism. The previous post, What are they Thinking?: Understanding the Mind and Values of the Woke – Part 3 Towards Postmodernism: The Rise of Linguistic Theories looked at how 20th Century philosophy started to move beyond the optimism of modernism to even questioning if words have meaning.
If you are unfamiliar with Structuralism and Post-structuralism, please read the previous post in this series.
Deconstruction
The movement know as deconstruction comes out of post-structuralism which argues that authors are always setting up binary opposites and preferencing one of them, but often in hidden ways. The deconstructionist argues that every author is attempting to exercise power over their reader through their writing. This means that the elevation of one side of a binary pair is really subtly putting down the opposite. In this, the deconstructionist is looking for “the suppressed binary opposite,” or the hidden victim of the author’s assertions. For instance, if a writer speaks of the headship of the father in the family, this is understood as an insidious form of sexism that is intended to “keep women in their place” and exercise male dominance over women. So, while the author may not have said anything negative about women, since the woman is the binary opposite of the man, to elevate the man must mean the suppression of the woman.
The practice of deconstruction was intended to “deconstruct” the text by critically evaluating the writing to uncover the real meaning of a text often by determining what is not said about the binary opposite of the text’s topic. Deconstructionists sometimes refer to this as “interrogating the text.” In this, even the author may be unaware of the power that he/she is trying to exercise. In its final form, all language is seen to be just a mask for power. The very attempt to convince another of the truth of something is understood as an attempt to exercise power over the other.[1]
As deconstructionism developed, it developed into two different streams, each led by and identified with a key thinker. Since deconstruction first developed in France, both men are French, but their influence quickly spread throughout Western academia. It was not long before deconstruction dominated not only literary studies, but most of the academic disciplines.
The first stream of deconstructionism is the hermeneutical approach. This approach was first developed by Jacques Derrida (1930–2004). Derrida created the concept of deconstruction, which he used to criticize literary and philosophical texts and even political institutions. According to Derrida, since all words are defined by other words, they have no relevance to the external world. Derrida argued that “There is nothing outside of text,” and therefore we cannot know anything objective. Building off of post-structuralism, he argued that all language operates in binaries, and this results in everyone placing one element over the other whenever they talk, write, or even think.[2]
Within hermeneutical deconstruction, the tone tended to be more playful.[3] Within this stream of thought, when a text is “pressured” the suppressed aspects of the text will come to the fore. However, there was little application that was done other than pointing out that there are these suppressed aspects of a text. A hermeneutical deconstructive reading of a text would therefore not look for the author’s intended meaning of a text but seek to uncover the unintended or hidden aspects of a text.
Deconstruction was turned into something with more force by Derrida’s contemporary, Michel Foucault. For Foucault, the key to understanding society and history is power. Foucault held that power is like a grid that runs through all layers of society and determines what people view as true. “Power is everywhere, not because it embraced everything, but because it comes from everywhere.”[4] Foucault saw power as an intrinsic aspect of all relationships, and one that is often unseen and therefore not recognized. This power then is built into what a society knows to be true as those who exercise more power influence what society views as true.[5]
Those that followed Foucault turned this understanding of power to deconstruction and thus created pragmatic deconstruction. Here the goal of deconstruction was not the playful demonstration of inconsistency in the author as Derrida held. Rather, Foucault’s understanding that all knowledge is just an expression of social power is applied to every text.[6] The goal of this form of deconstruction is to show the power plays that are at work in the text with the intention of being able to negate that power and overturn social constructs that are seen as oppressive.
Postmodernism
These linguistic theories, when turned to philosophy, and reality more generally, created the movement known as postmodernism. Postmodernism is inherently hard to define, and there is no easily agreed upon definition of the term. However, there are some key markers that we can see in this movement.
Since postmodernism arose out of linguistic theory, it should be no surprise that the term for all explanations of reality is “narratives.” Even a scientific explanation of something like the concept of gravity is a narrative, not truth. One of the key aspects of postmodern theory is that everyone has narratives to explain life, but there are no “metanarratives.” A metanarrative is an overarching story that explains objective truth. This is one of the reasons that postmodernism rejects biblical Christianity: it is a metanarrative.
Rather, everyone is formed by their social/cultural subgroups. According to postmodernism, everyone sees the world through the lenses of their subgroups, and it is assumed that everyone within the same subgroups will ultimately agree because they have been formed to think in the same way. This formation by and membership in the group is then understood to be a means of power exercised by those with power in the group in order to keep the others in line. Therefore, the traditional orders of life are considered to be manipulative and repressive. Since everything is understood in terms of power, it is assumed that trying to convince another person of a truth is really a form of manipulation and authenticity is considered to be a cynical trap.
The rejection of any way of knowing objective truth means that one’s perception is reality for that individual. You cannot say that another’s perception is wrong because it is true for them. This is where the idea of something being true for one person and not for another arose. For a true postmodern, the emphasis is on story, not truth. We cannot know ultimate truth, rather everyone has their story which is true for them.
The next post in this series turns to Social Justice Theory.
[1] Gene Edward Veith, Jr and Marvin Olasky, Postmodern Times: A Christian Guide to Contemporary Thought and Culture, First Paperback Printing edition. (Wheaton, Ill: Crossway, 1994) 51-59.
[2] Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, 1st American ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Pluckrose and Lindsay, Cynical Theories, 35-40.
[3] Stephen Ronald Craig Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism : Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, 1st ed. (Phoenix, Ariz. : Scholargy Pub., c2004.) 81.
[4] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1, an Introduction, trans. Robert J. Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1990) 93.
[5] Pluckrose and Lindsay, Cynical Theories, 93-94; Christopher Watkin, Michael Foucault, Great Thinkers: A Series. (Phillipsburg, New Jersey: P&R Publishing, 2018), 35ff.
[6] Hicks, Explaining PostmodernismI, 81.
determines? [JH1]
You change tense in this paragraph, starting with past and changing to present. [JH2]