I'll take a stab at a defence and explanation of Derrida's work, based on at least one of them, an interminable collection of essays. This will not be a logically developed argument, but one that follows a form of aesthetic reasoning, which depends on metaphors and similitudes.
I have very mixed opinions about Derrida. In some moods, I think he is an absurdity. In other moods, I think of him more as if he were a painter, conducting an exercise in a kind of formalism which by its nature can not be judged on aesthetic grounds at all. For example, there is no such thing as a bad color. It's a color--what else is it supposed to be? Whether I would use that particular color is a different question and any aesthetic judgment about a color is too comingled with its use and context to carry much weight.
So, it seems to me, a preferable approach to a critique is to make my explanation of what I think Derrida was doing in a series of relatively early essays and try to expand on those ideas. These are collected as _Speech and phenomena, and other essays on Husserl's theory of signs_, Northwestern Uni Press, 1973. I also want to expand a little on the inter-relationships between writing, architecture, and economic systems.
Deconstruction is used to name both a style of writing and a style of architecture. This linkage of words and stones might seem forced at first. It takes a little while to see the stylistic connection. What the connection amounts to is the creation of a variety of techniques that interrupt a flow of words and ideas, just as the continuous motion of the eye and the body are interrupted in their travels and encounters in architectural spaces.
So, in the world of deconstruction we are not allowed to follow through a sentence in a seamless manner, anymore than we are allowed to walk down a straight corridor to gain entrance to a room. Our eyes are not allowed to follow about the periphery of shape and close on a single gestalt of form. Or switching to language, several sentences do not lead beyond themselves, and any one sentence never seems to conclude as a consequence of its beginning. Sentences under the spell of deconstruction do not cohere and are not allowed to close.
Deconstruction depends on the presumption that there is a continuous flow, a directed path for seeing and speaking. It is further assumed that this directed linear format is the dominant mode of seeing and speaking, and by extension that our architecture and writing are similarly constructed--that they both exhibit and express an intentionally directed path. And further, it is assumed that these constructions are expressions of the way we think. More intimately still, it is assumed this concept of a directed flow is a model for thought, and is also a model for something fundamental to subjectivity--intentionality. So, under these assumptions, then there is a continuous and directed form or laminar flow, a field of arrows all pointing more or less in the same direction, and that this flow or field is be the target of an interruption or perturbation--the target to be deconstructed. The stylistic techniques to accomplish the deconstruction are methods employed to create perturbations, turns in the wrong direction, and interruptions of a directed thought.
The linearity of thought, movement, speech, and design is not the only target. There are a variety of presumed associations that can be made to dissociate through other methods. For example we automatically assume that sense and meaning are synonyms, and yet investigating them separately, can lead to non-overlapping differentiations and distinctions. In architecture, we assume that a main entrance to a building faces the street or is at one side or another, or in any event it is easy to get to and easily recognized. In other words we assume that form follows function. Again there are a variety of techniques to disturb these associations and separate out their components. A further example is the difference between speaking and writing. These can be dissociated from each other to compose quite different forms of language.
By a judicious and strategic use of deconstructive techniques, such as these, it is possible to construct a formalist critique of a variety of styles of writing, discourse, architecture and design. Taken onto a different stage, deconstruction can be said to mount such an implicit critique of rationalism and many of the stylistic expressions that compose our general idea of modernism in writing and architecture.
Such formalist critiques are in themselves not a new development, but are and have been applied during many periods in the history of the arts, philosophy, and architecture. In fact, rationalism and its expression as modernism is itself such a critique.
What is more difficult to discern is the connection between these historical developments and changes in formalist modes and other aspects of cultural and socio-economic conditions. One way to see the connection is to ask, for example, why is linearity such a dominant and apparently necessary format for everything from speech to architecture? More particularly, how are the formalism of writing and architecture connected to the formalism of economics?
We associate modernism as an architectural style with the methods of mass production which make it possible to undertake enormous constructions, and to reproduce these constructions by the millions. What is required to accomplish this feat is the unlimited reproduction of identical units, and an absolute simplicity of production. People, machines and production facilities need to produce these units at as a high speed as physically possible. Making things, like speaking, and travel are all bound together by this overriding demand for speed.
The need for speed leads us to creat linear systems in order to pack a maximized quantity of words, distance, or units of production, in the shortest amount of time possible. So, we have strip malls, and strip mall discourse.
So where does this dominant need for speed arise? The most obvious answer is capitalism. In order to accomplish an acceleration of profit, some form of time compression or its equivalent as increasing the speed of production is required. Hence the rat race is everywhere.
This analysis and explanation is obviously over simplistic, but consider that most people's lives are dominated by work and most work is in private industry, and therefore driven by the bottom line. Speed drives work, and work modes dominate our lives.
I won't argue that deconstruction is a particularly effective critique, since the methodology is formalist and obscure and therefore what it communicates is both ineffective and indirect. Furthermore, the basic thrust of its methods are all so intellectually bound, that they are easily dismissed as irrelevant. And, because of its formalist base, deconstruction is readily co-oped as a critique. After all, it assumes a linear rationality as a pre-existing condition and in some sense can not help but re-affirm this condition, since that constitutes the other, its own missing interlocutor. And, then too, almost all forms of formalism can be turned into a production method, which then is reproducible. Deconstruction in architecture is just as expressive of mass production methods as its antagonist, the modernism of the Bauhaus.
Chuck Grimes