Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction In Art

A branch of analysis that questions traditional assumptions about what we see, think, or do.

Deconstructivism is a challenging of tradition and is often controversial. It started as an

artistic movement that began in architecture by the end of the 1980s. It criticizes the rational order, purity, and simplicity of modern design and developed a new aesthetic based on complex geometries. It’s often considered a current of postmodernism.

There are likely theoretical influences on the movement. The philosophical critiques of Jacques Derrida, known as deconstruction, are thought to have influenced the development of deconstructivism. His analysis questions traditional models of thought and, among other things, proposes a duality in which words have meaning only because they contrast with other words, making the task of deconstruction to find and overturn those oppositions. For the artist, this means that an accepted ‘construction’ is necessary for creating and highlighting a deconstructed counterpart.

Deconstructivism Characteristics

One of the most defining characteristics of deconstructivism is that it challenges conventional ideas about form and order, as if the designs tried to liberate architecture and art from preconceived rules. The forms often disturb our thinking and evoke uncertainty and unpredictability. Through the controlled chaos, they challenge our own preconceptions.

Deconstructivist Examples:

We can find several amazing pieces that evidence the characteristics of this movement. As you could expect, most examples come from architecture. Others are furniture and small objects created by those architects commonly associated with deconstructivism.

The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain

This building was designed by architect Frank Gehry and was completed in 1997. Gehry says he considers each building a sculpture and approaches them as such; the Guggenheim is no exception. The building is located on the city’s riverbank and quickly became a local landmark, where it remains to this day. The side facing the river features most of the elaborate metal panels that fold and interlace, defining the complex and characteristic form of the museum. The backside, however, has simpler and more orthogonal volumes and is where most of the exhibition galleries are. It’s so visually iconic that it’s been featured in several different films that take place in New York, including Men in Black and The International.

The Extension of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada

The architect Daniel Libeskind designed this project, completed in 2007, as an expansion to the museum. Glass and aluminum panels make the exterior skin, which defines several irregular volumes, and the new project’s only link to the original building is several bridges. The design features lots of angles, pointed corners and overlapping surfaces. It’s been equally praised and criticized because of the strong contrast with the century-old structure.

Summary

Deconstructivism is an artistic movement seen mostly in architecture that started in the 1980s and criticizes common conceptions. The main characteristics are the objections to conventional ideas about form and order, the irregular complex geometries, manipulation of the surfaces, frequent use of diagonals and curves, and lack of symmetry. This movement is often considered a current of postmodernism.

It was influenced by Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction philosophy, which questioned traditional models of though and, among other things, proposed a duality in which words have meaning only because they contrast with other words; and the Russian constructivism of the early 20th century, which embraced new technologies and proposed that art was a practice of social purpose.

Deconstruction or poststructuralism is a type of literary criticism that took its roots in the 1960’s. Jacques Derrida began the theory when he set out to demonstrate that all language is associated with mental images that we produce due to previous experiences. This system of literary scrutiny interprets the meaning as effects from variances between words rather than their traditional meanings and what they represent. This philosophical theory’s goal is to reveal subconscious inconsistencies in a composition by going deeper to examine its underlying meaning. Derrida’s theory teaches that texts are unstable and queries the beliefs of words to embody reality. Deconstruction is to have a dual purpose.

Deconstruction showcases how different works of art are composed of numerous and sometimes contradictory meanings. Derrida, having a career in philosophy, begs the question, “what is the meaning of the meaning?”

Poststructuralists aggressively declare that we cannot trust linguistic systems to convey truth, which raises the question of, “what is truth?’’ We are surrounded subconsciously by illusions of what we have been taught to believe in.

Poststructuralist questions almost all of its forerunning theories, by asking the reader to literally deconstruct the text down to its very core. It picks an individual’s brain, provoking philosophical reasoning, asking questions in so to analyze a particular text.

In the short story by Charlotte Perkins Gillman, she uses phrases such as, a nursery turned into a bedroom; breezy, a bright country house; a garden; intricate, yellow wallpaper. These signs might cause one to paint a picture of a beautiful setting in which the family has embarked upon a dreamy summer vacation. The protagonist contradicts these signifiers when she insists on uneasy feelings about this place that she’s in and carries on about the people moving quickly by her window and the bars on the windows. Here, one could begin to piece together that she may very well not be on a pleasant getaway. It escalates the effect of dreadfulness by setting up traditionally acceptable or comfortable settings and striking a certain uneasy feeling in the reader. The narrator, Gillman herself, is a conventional late 1890′s woman, submissive to her husband, overcome with remorse about her being unable to care for her husband and newborn due to her mental illness. It is immediately apparent in the story that the woman allows herself to be inferior to men, particularly her husband, John. It is interesting to think how the story may have taken a completely different turn if it had been written from John’s point of view. Being a physician, he has special orders for her: To stay in bed, suppress her imagination, and most importantly to discontinue her writing. It makes one wonder how would the story be different if it had been written from John’s point of view? Though this text was written roughly two hundred years ago Derrida encourages the reader to put aside practical reasoning and think outside of the box, using rationalization. Only in the minds of the beholder do the answerers to the reader’s questions lie. This is all Derrida’s theory implies.

The term “Deconstruction” was first employed in the philosophical sense by Jacques Derrida in his 1967 book Of Grammatology. As such, the concept and movement of Deconstruction was founded solely by Derrida, without much influence from contemporary sources. However, Derrida did draw from previous philosophers such as Nietzsche, Husserl, the linguist Saussure, Heidegger, and the famous psychologist Sigmund Freud.

Deconstruction began as both an expansion and reaction to Structuralism, a movement that was particularly popular in 1960’s France. Though Derrida was somewhat influenced by structuralist thinkers, (most notable Saussure) Deconstruction can be by no means categorized at structuralist. Derrida did claim that Deconstruction held a certain element of Structuralism, [Derrida 1985] but that element is not definitive in nature; Deconstruction is independent from Structuralism.

Derrida founded the concept of Deconstruction for two reasons. One reason was that Derrida wanted to apply the Heideggerian concept of Destruktion “to his own ends.” [Derrida 1985] . Secondly, Deconstruction was created as a reaction to Structuralism, because Derrida saw the Structuralist notion of structure to be flawed. Defining Deconstruction is a nearly implacable task. Indeed, Derrida himself seemingly never gave an outright, exact definition of the term because he felt that “All sentences of the type ‘deconstruction is X’ or ‘deconstruction is not X’ a priori miss the point, which is to say that they are at least false.” [Derrida 1985] This is because that Deconstruction, like any other word, “acquires its value only from its inscription in a chain of possible substitutions, in what is too blithely called a ‘context‘.” [Derrida 1985]

However, this is not to say that Deconstruction itself could mean absolutely anything. Rather, Deconstruction can be said to be an event that takes place within a structure, not an approach to a text, but an event that is, as Derrida often phrased it, “always already” happening within a text. As such, Deconstructing a text does not entail the breaking down of a text by methodology, but rather a certain method by which the interpreter can demonstrate how Deconstruction has taken place in a text by virtue of that text being inherently dependent upon certain systems of referentiality, such as language or certain axioms which describe an epoch of thought. [Derrida 1966]

Perhaps a more fitting approach to “defining” Deconstruction might be by examining what it deconstructs, namely, the hierarchical constructs and binary dichotomies that permeate Western thought. Much of Deconstructive interpretation (and, indeed, Derrida’s work) is concerned precisely with the display of certain binary oppositions found within Western Philosophy. These oppositions usually consist of a dichotomy in which one term is favored heavily over the other. Derrida sought to display the invalid thought behind these oppositions in his 1967 book Of Grammatology in which he showed several examples of these dichotomies.

The first, and most important, was the opposition of Speech/Writing. Derrida argued that from Plato onward there has been significant favoritism of speech as opposed to writing, when in fact that opposition has no grounding. The common belief held by Western philosophers is that speech is a somehow “pure conduit” [Reynolds 2002] for thought, designating writing as a merely symbolic signifier of speech.

Saussure, for example, attempted to restrict the study of linguistics to the spoken, phonetic word only, for precisely the reasons listed above. However, Saussure also found that languages were somewhat arbitrary. He showed, for example, that English specifically creates a difference between the word “stool,” which is essentially a chair without a back, and the word “chair.” However, English does not separate between a chair with arms and a chair without arms. They are both simply chairs. But there is absolutely no reason why this should be so. Saussure therefore concluded that language was a system of signs characterized only by their differences, and also that the sign itself held no specific connection to the signified. The word “chair” for example, doesn’t have to be “chair.” It could be any other combination of phonemes native to English. Saussure therefore called this property the “Arbitrariness of the Sign.”

However, Derrida showed that Saussure was inconsistent in this regard. Derrida showed that if the sign was arbitrary with regard to the signified, then the spoken sign held no relationship to the signified. Therefore, Saussure could not logically contend that the written sign was separate from the spoken sign if, indeed, they are both equally removed from the signified.

Derrida thereby showed that such opposition as speech/writing was not only improperly favored in Western thought but also not even a proper binary opposition at all. This is precisely the kind of thought that takes place within Deconstruction; not an external approach to a structure, per se, but rather the display of contradictory internal constructs that make up a text. Furthermore, the Deconstruction of the text did not leave the structure “meaningless“, but rather altered its form. Derrida’s concept of difference depended heavily on Saussure’s theory regarding the removal of signifier from signified.

One of the main assumptions of Deconstruction is the concept of “difference.” Based upon Saussure’s linguistic theories, difference entails that words are signifiers that have no inherent meaning, but rather only are only granted significance by other signifiers. This means that “meaning” itself is completely dependent on context. This is why Derrida maintains that he cannot simply define Deconstruction; doing so would have to, by necessity, take into account every possible context the word “Deconstruction” could be placed into. As such, difference is placed into direct opposition of the long-held Western belief that meaning is self-existing or self-containing, instead of being ancillary to an endless system of referentiality.

This assumption is central to all of Derrida’s writing and Deconstruction itself. Without it, Derrida could not deconstruct the binary oppositions that permeate the Western culture, because, without this assumption, Derrida could never displace what is at the heart of Western metaphysics — meaning. As such, difference, and, by extension, play, are the ultimate concepts for Derrida, not “meaning.”

As applied to literature, Deconstruction cannot simply proceed into a text or structure simply as an approach for interpretation. Rather, Deconstruction seeks to find those hierarchical constructs that already are embedded in a text and expose them by reversal.

A perfect example of this can be found in Shelley’s sonnet Ozymandias.

First, The poem is obviously concerned with a binary opposition between power and downfall. Second, the text is concerned with showing this change through time.

As such, the poem ultimately attempts to wed the dichotomy of power and demise through the gaze of time. Though Ozymandias was once a great ruler, his statue, and, thereby, his stature, has been reduced to rubble and rubbish. The poem seeks to show the irony of Ozymandias’ arrogance by focusing on his inevitable and present destruction. However, the text favors the future and present over the past. The final four lines seek to show Ozymandias as defeated, which is true of the present. Yet, this present status is irrevocably dependent on Ozymandias’ past status of power. The text assumes that the present and future are more meaningful than the past, but in order for this preference itself to be meaningful, Ozymandias has to have been first established as a powerful king and ruler. It is only through preference, then that Ozymandias can be perceived as weak. Indeed, if time is removed from the picture altogether, then Ozymandias would be perceived as both powerful and weak, paradoxically. It is only by focusing on the present and future that Shelley is able to portray Ozymandias as weak and not powerful as he would appear if the text focused on the past.