Deconstructing discourses

Discourses are instances of knowledge-power and construct inequality. Given that these have a significant impact on people's lives and society as a whole, how can we examine and critique them? One of the answers is deconstruction, which is, in a sense, a type of pulling-apart of the discourses and the things that they construct. So in this article I'll talk about one way that we could approach deconstruction.

There are actually a few different concepts and definitions of deconstruction. As with some of the other concepts I've engaged with, I'm not going to strictly adhere to the pre-existing concepts, but instead use them as a source of inspiration, and I'll end up with a particular concept of my own that I'll strive to write down clearly here.

This process of deconstruction is about identifying discourses, and dissolving the conceptual categories that they create through "particularisation".

Identifying discourses

The first step is simply to identify the discourse. This is sometimes quite straightforward, and involves checking how we speak about things. We can ask ourselves which words we use, and why we use those particular words. Or we can ask ourselves what sort of categories we place things into.

This happens quite often when there is some contention over the meaning of a word. For example, we might disagree with someone on what we mean when we say "terrorist" or "religion" or "woman". As soon as we identify this tension, we are really asking questions about which words we use and why, though it is often in the context of "Why does this other person use the word differently to me?"

But often we might not really know that we are participating in a particular discourse. The whole thing can happen quite unconsciously. Perhaps we consider something "fair" or "common sense" and don't really investigate why we use this word instead of that word. In these cases it can be a little more difficult to identify that we are participating in a discourse, and we need a way to find a step back.

Given that different uses of the same word can make us have to justify why we might use a word one way and not another, one way to try and identify a discourse is to think about what alternative terms could have been used instead, or to seek out how other people or texts use the term. We might be surprised to find that the way we've been using it is very different to the way that other people have been using it. For example, what we consider "work" or what we consider "laziness" are just concepts. We might not have considered that they could be conceived of in different ways. Is taking some extra time off "lazy", a "reward" or "therapeutic"?

Identifying conceptual categories and finding the origins

The next step is to identify the conceptual categories in the discourse. To do this we need to ask, "What are the lines between one category and another?" Quite a lot of the time there are two categories that are somewhat the opposite of each other - the Self and the Other.

For example, the discourse could be about "art". To identify the discourse, first we note that "art" is used by different people in different ways - that is, what some people call "art" other people don't call "art". Quite likely, there are two opposing categories: "art" and something that is not "art". People appreciate and like the things that fall into the category of "art", and they find unpalatable or problematic the things that fall into the category of "not art" (maybe they find them pornographic, disgusting or too provocative). So one category is normal and moral (the Self) and the other is abnormal and immoral (the Other).

Once we've examined what the conceptual categories are, the next question is to see if we can find out how those categories formed. What's the origin of this particular use of the word "art"? Who came up with it, and in what context? This is the genealogy of the discourse. So it might be that people from a particular school of art are the ones who came up with the most common definition, or a judge who had to rule on a court case about art, or a religious group who make commentary on culture.

Finding out who came up with the concept can sometimes tell us a lot about it. Perhaps a particular art school came up with the term because they wanted to hold a position of power and prestige in the art world, and defining certain types of new and innovative art as "not art" would ensure that they were taken seriously while others were not. Perhaps the judge had to rule on what constituted "art" and what constituted "pornography", and so their own sensibilities (or the sensibilities of their community) entrenched a certain definition. Or maybe the religious group wanted to propose a definition of "art" that reinforced their own views on morality, rendering anything they found immoral or unpalatable to be "not art" and therefore not something to be taken seriously by society. On the other hand, if a punk group were to make the definition of the word "art", they might propose that art is provocative and rebellious, untamed, and something that holds a critical mirror up to institutions.

It's also quite likely that whoever it is that constructed the concept will be the ones that benefit from it. The art school could reject other forms of art from galleries and monopolise the legitimate art world. The judge and their community could fine or imprison people who make images they don't like, and ensure their removal. The religious group can culturally condemn people they identify as deviants, and even have secular people who accept this definition make the condemnations on their behalf. The punk group could legitimise graffiti, insults and mockery and delegitimise people who follow traditions.

Because discourses are knowledge-power, this part of the deconstruction is therefore also an examination of what power is and who holds it.

Suspicion of universals and well-defined categories

In general, the process of deconstruction is one that is suspicious of universal claims and well-defined categories. So the claim, "all x is art" or "all art is x" is something that we should be ready to pull apart.

For example, consider the claim that "all people are motivated by self-interest". We might begin by being suspicious that this claim isn't universal - that at least one person acts out of altruism. But then an advocate of the claim can say that people who help others do it to make themselves feel good, and it is therefore part of self-interest. This keeps the claim universal, but it stretches the meaning of "self-interest" because now a person's self-interest can include the interests of others (and it doesn't explain why it would make them feel good). We could also find examples of people putting their lives on the line for their children, and wonder whether the idea of the "self" extends to one's immediate family, or extended family, or local community, or nation, or so on.

The point is that it is likely that no claim is universally consistent, and that well-defined categories have at least some ambiguous liminal inclusions. So the process of deconstruction is not just about identifying how conceptual categories are made, but also the process of testing and pushing them until the neat walls that define categories fall down.

Particularisation

The end of this process is then "particularisation". There are at least two ways that this word is used.

The first is to recognise that any abstract categorisation or any universal rule doesn't really exist anywhere - they are claims made up by looking at lots of particulars. For example, if you want to say, "Art is x", this general rule is drawn from examining lots and lots of particular instances of what we are putting into the category of "art". "Art" itself does not exist - it is just a word used to refer to a bunch of instances (the particulars) that we have bundled together.

The second - and the more important, perhaps, for deconstruction - is the idea that because categories are all made up anyway, we should look at particular circumstances instead of relying on universal rules. So, for example, if someone commits a crime, a system of universal rules will say "x is always a crime" and "this crime should always have the same sort of response". In contrast, particularisation suggests that we should say, "What has happened in this circumstance?" and "What should we do in response?" without having to adhere to specific rules.

We already do this to some extent, and I mentioned a few examples on a previous page, such as judges having discretion to take the personal circumstances and contexts of the perpetrator and victim into account when conducting sentencing, rather than having to slavishly adhere to a set of abstract procedures. Of course, the argument against this is that it makes it more difficult to ensure things like consistency and fairness, but the post-structuralist would insist that both of those things are made up anyway.

Particularisation doesn't mean that people can't have general rules that they follow, such as principles of right and wrong, but rather that they need to test how and why those rules might apply to any particular situation and be ready to amend or contextualise them as the situation presents.

So the process of deconstruction looks something like this: identifying the way we use words and define concepts, figuring out where they came from to understand who gets power from them, testing and pulling apart those concepts to see what sort of sense they might make, and then focusing more on particulars than universal rules and definitions.

With all this in mind, in the next section I'll bring this idea together with the idea of democracy.