Deconstruction assumptions

In deconstruction the basic structuralist principle of difference is located ontologically as well as semiotically: at the very point of beingness of every thing there is difference -- or différance -- because only through différance is one thing not another thing instead. Différance comes before being; similarly, a trace comes before the presence of a thing (as anything which is is itself by virtue of not being something else, by differing, and that which it differs from remains as a trace, that whose absence is necessary for it to be); so too writing precedes speech -- a system of differences precedes any location of meaning in articulation. See my summary of Derrida, Différance.
Deconstruction, as do other poststructural theories, declines the structuralist assumption that structural principles are essences -- that there are universal structural principles of language which exist 'before' the incidence of language. (The emphasis on the concrete, historical and contingent in opposition to the eternalities of essence reveals one of deconstruction's filiations with existentialism.) All 'principles' of existence (i.e., of experience) are historically situated and are structured by the interplay of individual experience and institutional force, through the language, symbols, environment, exclusions and oppositions of the moment (and of the previous moments through which this one is constructed). Structures are historical, temporary, contingent, operating through differentiation and displacement.

Structuralist groundworks

Reality as we understand it is constructed of certain deep structural principles or organizations which may be configured differently on the level of experienced life, as we both operate and interpet them differently. Language, for instance, is compose of basic resources (langue) from which individual instances of its use are drawn (parole); cultures are formed through basic relations of economic production (the Marxist conception of the 'base'), but these may appear differently as cultures (economies, in the economic and more general sense) configure their ideas and arrangements (the 'superstructure'). The idea is that there are basic structures which are operationalized according to certain transformative rules in relation to the particulars of specific situations.

Deconstruction is a poststructuralist theory

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Deconstruction is a poststructuralist theory, based largely but not exclusively on the writings of the Paris-based Jacques Derrida. It is in the first instance a philosophical theory and a theory directed towards the (re)reading of philosophical writings. Its impact on literature, mediated in North America largely through the influences of theorists at Yale University, is based in part on the fact that deconstruction sees all writing as a complex historical, cultural process rooted in the relations of texts to each other and in the institutions and conventions of writing, in part on the sophistication and intensity of its sense that human knowledge is not as controllable or as cogent as Western thought would have it and that language operates in subtle and often contradictory ways, so that certainty will always elude us.

Deconstruction's emphasis

Deconstruction's emphasis on the proliferation of meanings
is related to the deconstructive concept of iterability. Iterability is
the capacity of signs (and texts) to be repeated in new situations
and grafted onto new contexts. Derrida's aphorism "iterability
alters" (Derrida 1977) means that the insertion of texts into new
contexts continually produces new meanings that are both partly
different from and partly similar to previous understandings.
(Thus, there is a nested opposition between them.). The term
"play" is sometimes used to describe the resulting instability in
meaning produced by iterability

Although deconstructive arguments show that conceptual
oppositions are not fully stable, they do not and cannot show that
all such oppositions can be jettisoned or abolished, for the principle
of nested opposition suggests that a suppressed conceptual
opposition will usually reappear in a new guise. Moreover,
although all conceptual oppositions are potentially deconstructible
in theory, not all are equally incoherent or unhelpful in practice.
Rather, deconstructive analysis studies how the use of conceptual
oppositions in legal thought has ideological effects: how their
instability or fuzziness is disguised or suppressed so that they lend
unwarranted plausibility to legal arguments and doctrines. Because
all legal distinctions are potentially deconstructible, the question
when a particular conceptual opposition or legal distinction is just
or appropriate turns on pragmatic considerations. Hence,
deconstructive arguments and techniques often overlap with and
may even be in the service of other approaches, such as
pragmatism, feminism or critical race theory.
Deconstruction began to have influence in the legal
academy with the rise of critical legal studies and feminism.
However, deconstructive scholarship eventually became part of an
emerging category of postmodern jurisprudence separate from
critical legal studies.
Deconstructive arguments in feminism have been
more clearly understood as a development and critique of earlier
feminist themes; they are best studied in the context of feminist
jurisprudence. This difference may have something to do with the
continuing vitality of feminism and the waning influence of critical
legal studies at the end of the 1980's.

Deconstruction does not

Deconstruction does not show that all texts are
meaningless, but rather that they are overflowing with multiple and
often conflicting meanings. Similarly, deconstruction does not
claim that concepts have no boundaries, but that their boundaries
can be parsed in many different ways as they are inserted into new
contexts of judgment. Although people use deconstructive
analyses to show that particular distinctions and arguments lack
normative coherence, deconstruction does not show that all legal
distinctions are incoherent. Deconstructive arguments do not
necessarily destroy conceptual oppositions or conceptual
distinctions. Rather, they tend to show that conceptual oppositions
can be reinterpreted as a form of nested opposition .
A nested opposition is an opposition in which the two terms bear a
relationship of conceptual dependence or similarity as well as
conceptual difference or distinction. Deconstructive analysis
attempts to explore how this similarity or this difference is
suppressed or overlooked. Hence deconstructive analysis often
emphasizes the importance of context in judgment, and the many
changes in meaning that accompany changes in contexts of
judgment.

Sometimes deconstructive

Sometimes deconstructive analyses closely study the figural
and rhetorical features of texts to see how they interact with or
comment upon the arguments made in the text. The deconstructor
looks for unexpected relationships between different parts of a text,
or loose threads that at first glance appear peripheral yet often turn
out to undermine or confuse the argument. A deconstructor may
consider the multiple meanings of key words in a text,
etymological relationships between words, and even puns to show
how the text speaks with different (and often conflicting) voices.
Behind these techniques is a more
general probing and questioning of familiar oppositions between
philosophy (reason) and rhetoric, or between the literal and the
figural. Although we often see the figural and rhetorical elements
of a text as merely supplementary and peripheral to the underlying
logic of its argument, closer analysis often reveals that metaphor,
figure, and rhetoric play an important role in legal and political
reasoning. Often the figural and metaphorical elements of legal
texts powerfully support or undermine the reasoning of these texts.

Despite Derrida's

Despite Derrida's insistence that deconstruction is not a

method, but an activity of reading, deconstruction has tended to

employ discernable techniques. Many deconstructive arguments

revolve around the analysis of conceptual oppositions. A famous

example is the opposition between writing and speech (Derrida

1976). The deconstructor looks for the ways in which one term in

the opposition has been "privileged" over the other in a particular

text, argument, historical tradition or social practice. One term

may be privileged because it is considered the general, normal,

central case, while the other is considered special, exceptional,

peripheral or derivative. Something may also be privileged

because it is considered more true, more valuable, more important,

or more universal than its opposite. Moreover, because things can

have more than one opposite, many different types of privilegings

can occur simultaneously.

One can deconstruct a privileging in several different ways.

For example, one can explore how the reasons for privileging A

over B also apply to B, or how the reasons for B's subordinate

status apply to A in unexpected ways. One may also consider how

A depends upon B, or is actually a special case of B. The goal of

these exercises is to achieve a new understanding of the

relationship between A and B, which, to be sure, is always subject

to further deconstruction.

Legal distinctions are often disguised forms of conceptual

oppositions, because they treat things within a legal category

differently from those outside the category. One can use

deconstructive arguments to attack categorical distinctions in law

by showing that the justifications for the distinction undermine

themselves, that categorical boundaries are unclear, or that these

boundaries shift radically as they are placed in new contexts of

judgment. (Schlag 1988).

Perhaps the most important use of deconstruction in legal

scholarship has been as a method of ideological critique.

Deconstruction is useful here because ideologies often operate by

privileging certain features of social life while suppressing or

deemphasizing others. Deconstructive analyses look for what is

deemphasized, overlooked, or suppressed in a particular way of

thinking or in a particular set of legal doctrines. Sometimes they

explore how suppressed or marginalized principles return in new

guises. For example, where a field of law is thought to be

organized around a dominant principle, the deconstructor looks for

exceptional or marginal counterprinciples that have an

unacknowledged significance, and which, if taken seriously, might

displace the dominant principle

In Europe

In Europe, on the other hand, deconstruction was
understood as a response to structuralism; it is therefore sometimes
referred to as a "poststructuralist" approach. Structuralism argued
that individual thought was shaped by linguistic structures. It
therefore denied or at least severely deemphasized the relative
autonomy of subjects in determining cultural meanings; indeed, it
seemed virtually to dissolve the subject into the larger forces of
culture. Deconstruction attacked the assumption that these
structures of meaning were stable, universal, or ahistorical.
However, it did not challenge structuralism's views about the
cultural construction of human subjects. Social theories that
attempt to reduce human thought and action to cultural structures
are sometimes called "antihumanist." Ironically, then,
deconstruction suffered the curious fate of being an antihumanist
theory that nevertheless was often understood in the United States
as making the radically subjectivist claim that texts mean whatever
a person wants them to mean. The misunderstandings that
deconstruction has engendered are partly due to the obscurity of
expression that often distinguishes the work of its adherents.

Deconstruction has a broader

Deconstruction has a broader, more popular, and a
narrower, more technical sense. The latter refers to a series of
techniques for reading texts developed by Jacques Derrida, Paul de
Man, and others; these techniques in turn are connected to a set of
philosophical claims about language and meaning. However, as a
result of the popularity of these techniques and theories, the verb
"deconstruct" is now often used more broadly as a synonym for
criticizing or demonstrating the incoherence of a position.
Deconstruction made its first inroads in the United States
through departments of literary criticism, which sought new
strategies for interpreting literary texts. As a result, deconstruction
became associated and sometimes confused with other trends,
including reader response theory, which argues that a text's
meaning is produced through the reader's process of encountering
it.

CONSTUCTIVSM AND RUSSIAN FUTURISM

Another major current in deconstructivist architecture takes inspiration from the Russian Constructivist and Futurist movements of the early twentieth century, both in their graphics and in their visionary architecture, little of which was actually constructed.

Artists Naum Gabo, El Lissitzky, Kazimir Malevich, and Alexander Rodchenko, have influenced the graphic sense of geometric forms of deconstructivist architects such as Zaha Hadid and Coop Himmelb(l)au. Both Deconstructivism and Constructivism have been concerned with the tectonics of making an abstract assemblage. Both were concerned with the radical simplicity of geometric forms as the primary artistic content, expressed in graphics, sculpture and architecture. The Constructivist tendency toward purism, though, is absent in Deconstructivism: form is often deformed when construction is deconstructed. Also lessened or absent is the advocacy of socialist and collectivist causes.

The primary graphic motifs of constructivism were the rectangular bar and the triangular wedge, others were the more basic geometries of the square and the circle. In his series Prouns, El Lizzitzky assembled collections of geometries at various angles floating free in space. They evoke basic structural units such as bars of steel or sawn lumber loosely attached, piled, or scattered. They were also often drafted and share aspects with technical drawing and engineering drawing. Similar in composition is the deconstructivist series Micromegas by Daniel Libeskind.

CONTEMPORARY ART

Two strains of modern art, minimalism and cubism, have had an influence on deconstructivism. Analytical cubism had a sure effect on deconstructivism, as forms and content are dissected and viewed from different perspectives simultaneously. A synchronicity of disjoined space is evident in many of the works of Frank Gehry and Bernard Tschumi. Synthetic cubism, with its application of found art, is not as great an influence on deconstructivism as Analytical cubism, but is still found in the earlier and more vernacular works of Frank Gehry. Deconstructivism also shares with minimalism a disconnection from cultural references. It also often shares with minimalism notions of conceptual art.
UFA-Palast in Dresden by Coop Himmelb)au

With its tendency toward deformation and dislocation, there is also an aspect of expressionism and expressionist architecture associated with deconstructivism. At times deconstructivism mirrors varieties of expressionism, neo-expressionism, and abstract expressionism as well. The angular forms of the Ufa Cinema Center by Coop Himmelblau recall the abstract geometries of the numbered paintings of Franz Kline, in their unadorned masses. The UFA Cinema Center also would make a likely setting for the angular figures depicted in urban German street scenes by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. The work of Wassily Kandinsky also bears similarities to deconstructivist architecture. His movement into abstract expressionism and away from figurative work, is in the same spirit as the deconstructivist rejection of ornament for geometries.

Several artists in the 1980s and 1990s contributed work that influenced or took part in deconstructivism. Maya Lin and Rachel Whiteread are two examples. Lin's 1982 project for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, with its granite slabs severing the ground plane, is one. Its shard-like form and reduction of content to a minimalist text influenced deconstructivism, with its sense of fragmentation and emphasis on reading the monument. Lin also contributed work for Eisenman's Wexner Center. Rachel Whiteread's cast architectural spaces are another instance where contemporary art is confluent with architecture. Ghost (1990), an entire living space cast in plaster, solidifying the void, alludes to Derrida's notion of architectural presence. Gordon Matta-Clark's Building cuts were deconstructed sections of buildings exhibited in art galleries.

modernism and POSTMODERNISM

Deconstructivism in contemporary architecture stands in opposition to the ordered rationality of Modernism. Its relationship with Postmodernism is also decidedly contrary. Though postmodernist and nascent deconstructivist architects published theories alongside each other in the journal Oppositions (published 1973–84), that journal's contents mark the beginning of a decisive break between the two movements. Deconstruction took a confrontational stance toward much of architecture and architectural history, wanting to disjoin and disassemble architecture.[2] While postmodernism returned to embrace— often slyly or ironically—the historical references that modernism had shunned, deconstructivism rejects the postmodern acceptance of such references. It also rejects the idea of ornament as an after-thought or decoration. These principles have meant that deconstructivism aligns itself somewhat with the sensibilities of modernist anti-historicism.

In addition to Oppositions, another text that separated deconstructivism from the fray of modernism and postmodernism was the publication of Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in architecture (1966). A defining point for both postmodernism and for deconstructivism, Complexity and Contradiction argues against the purity, clarity and simplicity of modernism. With its publication, functionalism and rationalism, the two main branches of modernism, were overturned as paradigms according to postmodernist and deconstructivist readings, with differing readings. The postmodern reading of Venturi (who was himself a postmodernist) was that ornament and historical allusion added a richness to architecture that modernism had foregone. Some Postmodern architects endeavored to reapply ornaments even to economical and minimal buildings, an effort best illustrated by Venturi's concept of "the decorated shed." Rationalism of design was dismissed but the functionalism of the building was still somewhat intact. This is close to the thesis of Venturi's next major work,[3] that signs and ornament can be applied to a pragmatic architecture, and instill the philosophic complexities of semiology.
Vitra Design Museum by Frank Gehry, Weil am Rhein

The deconstructivist reading of Complexity and Contradiction is quite different. The basic building was the subject of problematics and intricacies in deconstructivism, with no detachment for ornament. Rather than separating ornament and function, like postmodernists such as Venturi, the functional aspects of buildings were called into question. Geometry was to deconstructivists what ornament was to postmodernists, the subject of complication, and this complication of geometry was in turn, applied to the functional, structural, and spacial aspects of deconstructivist buildings. One example of deconstructivist complexity is Frank Gehry's Vitra Design Museum in Weil-am-Rhein, which takes the typical unadorned white cube of modernist art galleries and deconstructs it, using geometries reminiscent of cubism and abstract expressionism. This subverts the functional aspects of modernist simplicity while taking modernism, particularly the international style, of which its white stucco skin is reminiscent, as a starting point. Another example of the deconstructivist reading of Complexity and Contradiction is Peter Eisenman's Wexner Center for the Arts. The Wexner Center takes the archetypal form of the castle, which it then imbues with complexity in a series of cuts and fragmentations. A three-dimensional grid, runs somewhat arbitrarily through the building. The grid, as a reference to modernism, of which it is an accoutrement, collides with the medieval antiquity of a castle. Some of the grid's columns intentionally don't reach the ground, hovering over stairways creating a sense of neurotic unease and contradicting the structural purpose of the column. The Wexner Center deconstructs the archetype of the castle and renders its spaces and structure with conflict and difference.

CRITICAL RESPONSE

Since the publication of Kenneth Frampton's Modern Architecture: A Critical History (first edition 1980) there has been a keen consciousness of the role of criticism within architectural theory. Whilst referencing Derrida as a philosophical influence, deconstructivism can also be seen as having as much a basis in critical theory as the other major offshoot of postmodernism, critical regionalism. The two aspects of critical theory, urgency and analysis, are found in deconstructivism. There is a tendency to re-examine and critique other works or precedents in deconstructivism, and also a tendency to set esthetic issues in the foreground. An example of this is the Wexner Center. Critical Theory, however, had at its core a critique of capitalism and its excess, and from that respect many of the works of the Deconstructivists would fail in that regard if only they are made for an elite and are, as objects, highly expensive, despite whatever critique they may claim to impart on the conventions of design.

The Wexner Center brings vital architectural topics such as function and precedent to prominence and displays their urgency in architectural discourse, in an analytical and critical way. The difference between criticality in deconstructivism and criticality in critical regionalism, is that critical regionalism reduces the overall level of complexity involved and maintains a clearer analysis while attempting to reconcile modernist architecture with local differences. In effect, this leads to a modernist "vernacular." Critical regionalism displays a lack of self-criticism and a utopianism of place. Deconstructivism, meanwhile, maintains a level of self-criticism, as well as external criticism and tends towards maintaining a level of complexity. Some architects identified with the movement, notably Frank Gehry, have actively rejected the classification of their work as deconstructivist.
The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao by Frank Gehry, on the Nervión River in downtown Bilbao, Spain.

Critics of deconstructivism see it as a purely formal exercise with little social significance. Kenneth Frampton finds it "elitist and detached." Other criticisms are similar to those of deconstructivist philosophy—that since the act of deconstruction is not an empirical process, it can result in whatever an architect wishes, and it thus suffers from a lack of consistency. Today there is a sense that the philosophical underpinnings of the beginning of the movement have been lost, and all that is left is the aesthetic of deconstruction.[13] Other criticisms reject the premise that architecture is a language capable of being the subject of linguistic philosophy, or, if it was a language in the past, critics claim it is no longer.[5] Others question the wisdom and impact on future generations of an architecture that rejects the past and presents no clear values as replacements and which often pursues strategies that are intentionally aggressive to human senses.