The world of social relations and social power structures we move around in is contructed by people. And just as I think it useful for a physician to be able to deconstruct the human body when he is treating a patient, I think it is equally important for people who are hoping to change society for the better to understand how society is constructed. I have found that deconstruction is a useful tool in this endeavor.
[WS:] I think there is more than that in the deconstruction business. It is the unspoken premise of the US-style (or perhaps Anglo-Saxon) individualism - that everything social is something arbitrary, artificial and superfluous that has been imposed on individuals, and therefore individuals can be freed from that baggage through "deconstruction." Without that assumption, this whole deconstruction business makes no more sense than, say, an effort to "free" human soul from the body in which it has been "imprisoned."
An alternative view is that human individual (i.e. a normally developed person) is product of society and its culture and those two cannot be separated, just like the mind and the body being just two aspects of the same entity, as Spinoza argued. While social order and culture are arbitrary in the sense of not being caused or determined by natural phenomena, there are not arbitrary in the sense of individuals choosing and wearing them the way they do clothes.
>From that point of view a person cannot be simply stripped of "arbitrary"
social baggage the way he or she can be stripped of his or her clothes or
other material possession. His/her very individual essence is defined by
the social, the collective. "Deconstruct" the social - and you destroy a
person.
For that reason, I consider most of the "deconstruction industry" to be mere exercises in flippancy, and most of it humorless. Jest - or flippancy with humor - plays an important social of goading people to self-reflection, but humorless flippancy found in most of the 'deconstruction industry' is merely annoying. It is a way of showing off how smart and dandy the speaker or writer is at the expense of others. It does not produce any self-reflection, only animosity toward the speaker.
Wojtek