Deconstruction
March 29, 1996 Brief
Deconstruction as a philosophy, as an architecture, as
a design school, calls on us to QUESTION AUTHORITY, blow
EVERYTHING A P A R T, tear up the roots, find origins, insult the
causes, attack as a wild animal with a mind. Truly how and why
have things come to be?
Interview
Deconstruction locates certain crucial oppositions or
binary structures of meaning and value that constitute the
discourse of 'Western metaphysics'. These include (among many
others) the distinctions between form and content, nature and
culture, thought and perception, essence and accident, mind and
body, theory and practice, male and female, concept and metaphor,
speech and writing etc. A Deconstructive reading then goes on to
show how these terms are inscribed within a systematic structure
of hierarchical privilege, such that one of each pair will always
appear to occupy the sovereign or governing position. The aim is
then to demonstrate - by way of close reading - how this system
is undone, so to speak, from within; how the second or
subordinate term in each pair has an equal (maybe a prior) claim
to be treated as a condition of possibility for the entire
system. Thus writing is regularly marginalised, denounced or put
in its place - a strictly secondary, 'supplementary' place - by a
long line of thinkers in the Western tradition, from Plato and
Aristotle to Rousseau, Husserl, Saussure, Levi-Strauss and the
latter-day structuralist sciences of man. But just as often - as
Derrida shows in Of Grammatology - writing resurfaces to
assert its claim as the repressed other of this whole logocentric
tradition, the 'wandering outcast', scapegoat or exile whose
off-stage role is a precondition of the system. And this curious
'logic of supplementarity' operates wherever thinking is
motivated by a certain constitutive need to exclude or deny that
which makes it possible from the outset.
Architecture & Digital Media
The angry deconstructive excavations by the 15th century Italian
architects at the foot of the church energized a Renaissance.
Beginning with a controversial self-evident right to see and
illustrate reality they led the restoration of lost ideas refound
in the present - the Roman arch & dome, domestic courtyard.
They retreived their past identity. Nietzche warns that history
is the process by which the dead bury the living. Nonetheless
architects today are encorporating ancient styles, existing
remnants of previous buildings and rexploring our building
assumptions in a deconstructive fashion. Today's architects like
Francis-Ford Bressica define deconstruction with their buildings.
Look at them.
Deconstruction is required
to invent digital media.