Deconstructivitus
Definition
A serious philosophical condition of constantly deconstructing everything.
Description
Deconstructivitus is the state, familiar to anyone who has spent long enough in critical theory or in an anthropology department, in which the analytic habit stops being something one applies and becomes something one cannot stop applying. Every advertisement is a text. Every queue is a disciplinary apparatus. Every menu encodes a class position. The greeting card cannot be given without a short internal essay on the commodification of sentiment.
The condition is named on the model of an inflammation — bursitis, appendicitis — and the joke is precise. What is inflamed is a faculty that is entirely healthy in normal use. The ability to see that an arrangement is constructed rather than natural is the central skill of the social sciences and the beginning of most worthwhile criticism. Deconstructivitus is that ability with no off switch.
Symptoms
- An inability to consume any cultural object without reading it.
- The reflexive location of power relations in ordinary transactions.
- Difficulty finishing sentences that do not contain a qualification.
- Suspicion of one's own preferences on the grounds that they were produced.
- A tendency to answer "do you like it?" with an account of the conditions under which liking is possible.
- Social attrition, as companions weary of hearing what the film was really about.
Why It Happens
The habit is trained deliberately and rewarded consistently. In academic settings, the person who identifies the unexamined assumption wins the argument; the person who takes the thing at face value has failed to do the work. Several years of this produces an automatic response, and automatic responses do not distinguish contexts. The skill that earns a doctorate also ruins a birthday.
There is also a structural asymmetry that keeps the condition going. Deconstruction is much easier than construction, and it is always available: any account, however careful, can be shown to rest on something unexamined, including the account doing the showing. Because the move never fails, it offers a permanent sense of insight without requiring one to commit to anything — which is precisely what makes it a condition rather than a method.
Treatment
Chiefly: remembering that the point of noticing a construction is to be able to build a better one, and that criticism which never arrives at a preference has stopped being useful to anyone. Bruno Latour's late essay "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?" (2004) makes the argument at length, observing that the critical reflex has been so thoroughly absorbed into general culture — including by conspiracy theorists — that its diagnostic value has declined and that scholarship might now be more usefully occupied with assembling things than with taking them apart.
