Two Moments of Deconstruction

Recall, if you will, Derrida’s notion of the originary violence of language. 

Imagine a meadow with lots of wildflowers in bloom. Each flower is its own unique event, something never to be duplicated. The conditions of soil, light, moisture, exposure to wind and the like, all of these combine with the emergent organism to produce something that is what it is.

Now think about the categorizing gesture, the naming gesture, the hierarchizing gesture. Purple coneflower, Shasta daisy, Dame’s rocket, Queen Anne’s Lace, Goldenrod. 

Flowers.

The entry into the symbolic subjects the “individual” to a series of equivalences, into a system meant to compare, contrast and determine relative value. It inserts us into an economy, where our own value is determined only in relation to the value of others.

At times, it seems incredibly important to re-assert our own value from within an economy. A moment where we demand political and social recognition. I have argued that this is a moment where we are attempting to make good use of the master’s discourse--where we willingly, for the moment, go along with claims about what is either natural or essential to our being. 

The task of deconstruction is both a moment of unmasking pretense to essence or nature; but, as I think Irigaray taught us, deconstruction is also the work of re-making, re-valuing, re-asserting from within the economy. It is a willingness to make claims about who we are and who we wish to be, despite all the dangers that come along with such statements. (Dangers that involves setting up new norms, for ourselves and others, to live up to.)

Bakhtin speaks ultimately about this second moment of deconstruction--its strategically productive side--as Ideological Becoming. “The ideological becoming of a human being, in this view, is the process of selectively assimilating the words of others.” 

In contrast to our own ideological becoming, Bakhtin posits a dead, ossified, lifeless discourse: authoritative discourse. By contrast, “it is not a free appropriate and assimilation of the word itself that authoritative discourse seeks to elicit from us; rather, it demands our unconditional allegiance. Therefore, authoritative discourse permits no play with the context framing it, no play with its borders, no gradual and flexible transitions, no spontaneously creative stylizing variants on it. It enters our verbal consciousness as a compact and indivisible mass; one must either totally affirm it, or totally reject it.”

Completely authoritative discourse has no play. It is seen as the absolute word of God, revealed, to be repeated, but never appropriated or diverted. There are utterances that are invested with this type of power. 

That said, most languages do provide some place for selective appropriation. Indeed, I guess one might argue that the mark of good pedagogy is the degree to which one’s own words are amenable to the diverse and disparate appropriations of others--the degree to which our own words assist in the Ideological Becoming of an other.