A Rationalist Critique of Deconstruction: Demystifying Poststructuralism and Derrida's Science of the "Non"

INTRODUCTION:

What Deconstruction Is and Is Not

The philosophy of Deconstruction, which was most significantly expounded by its founder, Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), has retained an appeal to intellectuals over the course of four decades as a putatively value-free (wertfrei) approach to linguistics and human knowledge.  Deconstruction has been a particularly useful tool for proponents of multicultural trends in identity politics, since it has provided a subjectivist programme for politically decentered discourse.  It has thus quite often been subjected to intense critical backlash by its political opponents. Though the conservatives on the Left and Right have attacked deconstruction as a relativistic philosophy that is nothing more than "obscurantisme terroriste, encrypted hocus-pocus, disingenuously apolitical gobbledygook, a slum of philosophy," or verbal virtuosity clothed in neo-Marxian jargon, deconstruction has rarely been explained in such a way as to outline its methodological foundations independent of political or aesthetic considerations.1  In fact, many proponents of deconstruction have dismissed critics who attempt to root out its epistemological foundations as politically-motivated ideologues de facto, since deconstruction is supposed to be already there in knowledge claims phrased in problematic languages that are intentionally structured by a social aggregate from the top-down. They have thus hedged the philosophy from rationalist inquiries, since rationalism—and especially economic rationalism—is pegged as a particularly Western ideology out to protect itself from its critics through various rhetorical techniques and manufactured axioms. 

Wherever any two philosophies conflict, yet both claim a stake in a value-free foundation, it is difficult for many parties interested in the debate to find a way out of the source of contention, when one provides axiomatic grounds for criticism and the other denies the existence of axioms contrary to the theory proposed.  Deconstruction’s denotation is troubled in popular perception, since the word has entered popular usage under a false guise as de-construction—a word connoting the logical dissection of complex phenomena, the way an individual might get back to the foundation of a wall by systematically and sequentially pulling bricks from the top of the finished product, one-by-one, until finally reaching the base. Logic is rooted in axioms, principles, and deduction.  Quite often, the logician dissects complex social and natural phenomena by de-constructing finished products to get to the root causes that produce the final outcome. In reality, Deconstruction as a philosophy could not be further from this popular usage of the term than it actually is.  Deconstruction does not logically dissect phenomena; instead, it would define a wall by looking at the wall from the position of negative space in which there is no fixed vantage point.  This negative space is not only empirically diverse; it is completely unhinged from logic and coherent epistemology because it is the realm of the Other, which is the realm of diverse individuation that rejects methodological individualism by default.  It is the voice of the mob as it converges upon the firebrand.  There is no epistemology at Deconstruction’s base that accepts microeconomic rationalism or self-consistent Logic, since knowledge is socially constructed upon a foundation of irrationalism and negativity, and knowledge is not individually processed.  Risks and rewards do not play a large role in the individual psyche.  Instead, risks and rewards are socially constructed and passively registered by new entrants to life, then replicated in large part.  While one could make a cultural argument for such an arrangement, one could never make a consistent epistemological argument for that position.

The main stumbling block to achieving a constructive outline of deconstruction’s premises lies precisely in the fact that the derrideans hold that deconstruction is neither a process nor a methodology ("pas de methode"), and that, as a counter-constructive philosophy, it has no central impetus to action.2  According to this empirical dogma, one does not deconstruct a text in the transitive mode.  Rather, the impetus to deconstruction is already there, like the primordial waters over which the deity moves prior to the act of creation.  Economists have often claimed for themselves a similarly apolitical stance in sociological analyses by labeling their field as the study of human action (viz. human nature), which is the study of the subjective use of scarce resources, and it should come as no surprise that postmodern derrideans have attempted to leverage their social ideologies against both classical and vulgar economics and logic like the ever-apolitical Marxian hermeneutists of old.3

Deconstruction, the derrideans have maintained, is an apolitical critical science that is immune to ideological factionalism characteristic of philosophical positions in the Western intellectual tradition (i.e., the capitalistic West).4  Troubling those who would criticize or even defend deconstruction’s ideological position, however, is the fact that deconstruction’s founder, Jacques Derrida, wrote his seminal texts in an ever-ambiguous prose that was demonstrative of his elusive and subjectivist philosophy for textual interpretation. As soon as one pins deconstruction down for dissection, the philosophy’s proponents seem to wriggle out of scrutiny with relativistic arguments that trouble the critic’s position. Since it is not always clear what Derrida meant when writing his obscure texts—and this problem of subjective interpretation lies at the heart of deconstruction’s premises—a multiplicity of interpretations concerning deconstruction’s definite properties has been a hallmark of poststructuralist discourse for the philosophy’s turbulent life in academia.5  While one could pin Kant to his categorical imperative or to the existence or non-existence of synthetic a priori judgments, one cannot pin Derrida’s thoughts to something definite.  Derrida was the scion of the negative space in the analysis of ideas, or the voice of the mob in de-constructing cultural phenomena, and trying to find Derrida’s own secure foundation in method is a labor that is antithetical to his process.  His positions always seem to take on the character of a quantum particle under observation: one can find his trajectory or his position, but never at the exact same time.

Half of the task that I have undertaken in this book consists in translating Derrida’s terminology into decipherable form, pinning him down as the heir to the pre-Socratics, and especially to Parmenides.  I believe it to be a task of utmost importance that I first sketch a fair gesture of what deconstruction is and is not, since the philosophy’s very name tends to draw strong reactions from its proponents and opponents. I think that there are good and bad aspects of deconstruction; some of the good aspects helped to marginalize artificial formalisms in literary analysis.  Some of the bad aspects have served as a crutch for the rise of cultural Marxism.  It is also a task of some moment to outline my own position in Austrian economics (or, Marginal Utility economics in the tradition of Carl Menger, Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, and Ludwig von Mises) during this critique.  Few who are conversant in the former philosophy are fluent in the latter, and vice versa.  No doubt many derrideans will cry abuse when Derrida’s philosophy is translated into common parlance and pegged down to its underlying method; but there is a good reason to make that translation available.  When the philosophy is pinned down to its practical applications and its first principles, one sees that it is, if not a simple philosophy to understand, at least not something unfamiliar to the logician. For the most part, I will not be engaging Derrida’s texts to any significant degree, since this is a task that has already been performed ad nauseum.  This book is a guide to the philosophy overall, to the deconstructionist method, and it provides a critical framework that equips the wary reader or graduate student for encounters with this philosophy.  I will begin with first principles, and these first principles shall weather the criticisms of deconstruction laid at their feet.

In the following chapters, I will apply the basic tenets of microeconomic rationalism and the science of human action, or praxeology, to the twin philosophies of structuralism and deconstruction in order to root out their basic methodology.  I have found that deconstruction, as much as it has been understood and misunderstood over the years, is in its process and methodology the same thing as Pareto’s Indifference Theory in postmodern guise.6 Indifference Theory was a failed microeconomic theory established in the works of Francis Edgeworth and Vilfredo Pareto as branch of microeconomic Consumer Choice Theory in the early twentieth century.  Oddly, this failed theory has somewhat succeeded in the American academy, and is still taught to economics students to this day where the disastrous paradigm of Keynesian economics still holds sway. Students of economics who become the professors of tomorrow still draw charts and curves ad infinitum, and they believe that mathematics and social engineering hold the key to economic development.  The role of human action, and the deductive science that draws economic laws from foundational axioms, is a mere footnote in the microeconomic sphere, despite the fact that it is the substance of economics proper. The key idea to Indifference Theory is that the microeconomist can evaluate differential values of various alternatives on the human actor’s margin and then plot an Indifference Curve that shows at what point a consumer is more or less indifferent to a good or bundle of goods when making a choice to consume or sell goods.  By plotting an Indifference Curve, the indifference theorist attempts to show where the consumer may have equated the marginal value of a particular good to another good with regard to indifference, rather than preference.  In Chapters VIII and IX, I address this equivalence in theories a little more fully, critiquing both theories with one counterargument, since it is helpful to note that the fundamental machinations of deconstruction have made their appearance elsewhere in the human sciences—and much earlier than Derrida’s first works.  Though Indifference Theory is not a harmful theory, it is self-contradictory and may be misused by those who do not fully understand economics proper.  In the same way, deconstruction is not a harmful theory, but it is vital to poststructuralist discourse in the contemporary academy, even if it is somewhat in decline.  Poststructuralism has so far proven to be a key factor of regression in academic intellection as an administrative tool, and it has led to many undesirable developments on college campuses as its key precepts have become institutionalized: racial disharmonization, tribalization (of racial, sexual, and gender identity), anti-capitalistic brainwashing, social justice campaigning, assaults on free speech, and the enshrinement of identity politics as an intellectual, professional, and argumentative credential.  In fact, it has struck me over and over again that in the political realm the same debates between poststructuralism and formalism that have occurred in collegiate Humanities departments since the 60s have now spilled out into public discourse, where few were ever equipped to combat the philosophical frameworks now leading the fray.

Austrian economics, on the other hand, developed in the subjective value tradition of the Marginalist Revolution (ca. 1870), in which Carl Menger, William Stanley Jevons, and Léon Walras cast off the mantle of the objective value theories proposed by Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx.  By examining the way in which humans rank preferences ordinally and act for psychic satisfaction (hence earning marginalist theory the label psychological economics), rather than attempting to root out objective or intrinsic cardinal values in things, the marginalist approach to economics outlined the foundational principles of human action proper for the economics of direct exchange (barter-based economies), indirect exchange (the market economy), and even showed that the imaginary construction of the autistic socialist economy (as an Equilibrium construct) was a useful tool as a theoretical foil to the praxeological sciences.7  More importantly, the Mengerian tradition explored the a priori assumptions that are necessary for the epistemology of human action at the level of the individual, which is a tradition recently mirrored by certain Chomskyan trends in linguistics.8

Both deconstruction and Austrian economics share an inherent link in their emphasis on subjective valuation.9  However, when placed in the light of the Austrian Method, deconstruction is shown to be a facile approach to the subject matter that it addresses—a subject matter rooted in the subjectivity of value and meaning.  Where Deconstruction touches subjective valuation as an epistemological doctrine, it fails utterly and completely.  Where it is employed to examine cultural phenomena, it has had some beneficial outcomes in academic discourse by stressing subjective perception.  Derrida’s science of negativity, however, is practically and foundationally bankrupt, since it has opened the doorway not to subjective valuation, but instead to subjective epistemology.  Through the lens of the Austrian tradition, which has yet to blossom into its own revolution within the academy, deconstruction is shown to have no more merit than as a wily and brilliant critique of the structuralist paradigm for linguistic studies. As such, the first definition that I would draft for deconstruction is that it is a very successful and witty critique of structuralism, phrased as a reductio ad absurdum.   In order to understand deconstruction and poststructuralism, one must first understand the pseudo-rationalist theory of structuralism, which opened the floodgates to what succeeded its ebb in the academy.

CHAPTER I:

Deconstruction as a Critique of Structuralism

The structuralists (fl. 1906-1970) were a group of self-proclaimed rationalists that attempted to study language as that which gave order to the logical structure of mind, and they did so through an analysis of human behavior from a basically irrationalist premise.10  In praxis, structuralism failed to establish a constructive methodology consistent with its premises, primarily because the philosophy’s proponents assumed that meaning and language were predicated upon the establishment of a difference principle and not in the human values that arose out of the structure of human action—preferring goods on the margin for the satisfaction of wants and the alleviation of uneasiness.11  This difference principle was a tool of semiology and logic that highlighted the spoken and written differences between words, morphemes, and phonemes in terms of inflection, articulation, physical representation, and aural idiosyncrasies. Yet, the structuralists still failed to arrive at a universally valid a priori theory of human action that was consistent with the difference principle. Granted, they never set out to achieve that end; but insofar as humans use means to attain ends, which is an a priori deduction that cannot be passed over in the attempt to study language as something a posterirori, no study of language can treat the subject as ersatz; as something divorced from intentionality, subjectivity in meaning, selection, choice, and interpretation.

The structuralists could not answer the basic problems of human behavior that confronted them because they worked primarily within an etiological framework, confining themselves to cause-and-effect relations without human intentionality as a guide. The usual bugbears of catholicized empirical dogma quickly rise to the surface when first encountering structuralism’s tenets: What is it that could establish difference as the a posteriori criterion for the derivation of meaning and language without presupposing teleology prior to the establishment of a difference principle? If humans use means to attain ends, and if this is valid not only in economics but also in argumentation, research, analysis, and observation, then how could the fact that humans use means to attain ends ever be learned passively?  Would not a human being have to use means to obtain the end of learning through observation and experience passively?  Does not something have to be predicated of a subject? If humans are innately irrational prior to learning language passively, then how is difference perceived and established in a completely objective, universally valid theoretical framework without the language that is supposed to precede rationality?  If the mind is innately irrational, then how does one establish differences within the framework of the tabula rasa?  How is positive difference made in a passive epistemology? 

When a human chooses between two alternatives in any one course of action (where one alternative may very well be to not act, or to refrain from acting), only one alternative is subject to experience and observation.  The alternative chosen is what is experienced.  Choosing between alternatives, or between different actions, presupposes an alternative that cannot be experienced or observed; and yet our knowledge of that alternative’s potential remains a vital component in human action and is an integral part in our remembrance of reality’s trajectory.  It represents a cost; a reality sacrificed for expedience, if only temporarily.  Yet we know that human action always entails a cost, since human action aims at ends, using means (one of which is the rationing of Time), by ranking goods on the margin.  Clearly, whichever alternative gets sacrificed to become a cost cannot be experienced in the moment, and yet it is known.  We know that time is forever marching onward as the province of irrecoverable costs that cannot be experienced because they were originally rejected from experience.  Experience, quite to the contrary of catholicized empirical epistemology, requires knowledge of what was never actually experienced.  The existence of what we know presupposes that we rejected an alternate reality in time and space (in which human action occurs) in favor of the reality (in which human action occurs) that we believed would satisfy our interests.

Quite to the contrary of the structuralist assumption of the tabula rasa, the province of human action is teleological by definition.12  Humans are purposive beings who use means to accomplish ends for psychic satisfaction in the passage of time. The knowledge of change itself, which is an intentional disruption of the expected order of things in a way that better suits an actor’s desires, presupposes the field of economics.  The natural sciences utilize a specific teleological method in order to examine change from the perspective of unintentional causation.  Economics is the science not only of human action and the structure of preference; but it is also the science that presupposes the existence of costs (of what was never experienced).

Why difference should have stood at the root of a rationalist approach to linguistics is perplexing, since structuralism’s perceptions of difference rely upon comparisons of empirical data without any overarching theoretical considerations of what perceives difference.  The precise selection of minutiae for comparison, which is the beginning of differentiation, requires preference and valuation prior to difference.  One must bring two or more concepts together as complements before one can establish oppositions.  One must select items for comparison and differentiation, screening out all other variables that were open for intellectual dissection.  To analyze an apple, bear, cat, or Derrida, one must first select the object for comparison by not choosing to analyze Kant.  One chooses the highest ranked good on the margin at a particular point in time, since the potential for personal profit (the relief of a psychological uneasiness) ranks highest at the moment.  We would have to presuppose the rational mind to arrive at difference in comparisons of things, which presupposes the rudiments of pre-linguistic logic. Humans, in selecting two things for opposition, bring those two things together for comparison first and foremost. By bringing different things into relation, humans create costs at the exact same time.  All things may not be known simultaneously.

Derrida was aware of this contradiction in Structuralism, which Saussure and his students did not fully address due to incomplete methods, and in fact based his entire philosophy upon that Achilles ’ heel in the structuralist methodology to demolish his rationalist forebears on the slippery slope to catholicized empiricism. The basic axioms of praxeology and subjective value theory, in turn, level a fatal and devastating critique at the radically empirical assumptions of Derrida’s counter-structuralist philosophy. 

Many of the most devoted derrideans have remained ignorant of the critical contradiction at the root of deconstruction on methodological grounds, which it inherited from the structuralist philosophy upon which it preys.  Since many of those same derrideans regularly teach the philosophy in language and literature departments of graduate and undergraduate programs worldwide, I hope to provide a guide to the theory, as well as its refutation, in order to equip students to demolish deconstruction’s arguments in the classroom in the pursuit of truth and logic.

Deconstruction and structuralism were heavily dependent upon basic logic and semiology as it developed amongst the late Scholastics and early medieval logicians, but contemporary scholars have continually attributed the fundamentals of deconstruction to Derrida, perhaps because they passed over deconstruction’s methodological groundwork in an eagerness to discuss the Master’s indebtedness to Husserl, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Hegel—the sexy existentialists, irrationalists, and phenomenologists so much the rage in the postmodern academy.  The basic premises of deconstruction and structuralism were rooted squarely in the Western tradition of logic and semiology established by the medieval schoolmasters, John Wycliffe, John Stuart Mill, and William Stanley Jevons. Where deconstruction carved out space for its germination was in the negative space that surrounds logic and its inherent drive for axiomatic foundations.

In the following chapters, I shall focus upon this logical foundation of deconstruction.  I am far from the first critic to sally out in opposition to Derrida.  John M. Ellis presented the first truly sweeping critique of the deconstructionists in Against Deconstruction, and Robert Phiddian brilliantly noted the inherent likeness between deconstruction and the genre of parody in his analysis of deconstruction’s application to literary criticism.13  Nevertheless, even these powerful works of criticism did not pinpoint the methodological foundation of deconstruction as a process and as a philosophy.14  It is the opinion of the author of this argument that only logical economics provides the critical framework by which the merits and demerits of deconstruction can be established with any authority.  Since deconstruction is a critique of preference and value, its method falls within the soft science of logical economics—praxeology proper.  While I am disconcerted by the cultural applications of poststructuralist philosophy, this critique is aimed mostly at the deconstruction’s method.  By and large, the greater number of critiques of deconstruction merely amount to a huffing and a puffing, a red-in-the-face: "Listen here, Jack!  Just who in the hell do you think you are to tell me that we can't really come to an agreement about what I mean!"  I hope that the present essay will provide a comprehensive guide to deconstruction for the perplexed, the discomfited, and the outraged.

I shall here make the case that deconstruction fails as a philosophy on the basis of its radically empirical root in epistemology, which neglects the role that theory (a priori) plays in the elucidation of human knowledge.  Furthermore, on the cultural level, I will show that Deconstruction’s popular critique of Western Civilization on the grounds of its obsession with the metaphysics of presence also falls short of its mark. This particular element of deconstruction remains a vital component of Derrida’s legacy amongst the poststructuralists.  It is also, I contend, a problem central to logic and to economics where the metaphysics of presence (or preference) is always counterbalanced by an economic phenomenon that goes by the name of Cost.  In order to sketch the groundwork for future analyses of Deconstruction on these points,