After seemingly endless months of grueling labor, the deconstruction project lies coldly in a wooden box six feet beneath the ground. And boy am I happy.
I learned some things:
Like every spud of post-modernism, deconstruction grew out of and against modernism. The deconstructors, beginning with Jacques Derrida wanted to point out and amend the insufficiencies of structuralism. And who can blame them? Structuralism, like modernism, presupposes linguistic finitude. More fundamentally (and more troublesome), structuralism presupposes that humans can, through their reason alone, discover absolute truth. They view the natural sciences as absolute in and of themselves. The modernists views the novel as closed and complete. The text contains certain codes that deliver certain meanings. The reader can learn the code and decipher the meaning.
Derrida and many after him could not accept this notion. Particularly, Derrida believed that language is inherently incapable of delivering truth. To understand something, one must know its relationship to everything else that exists. Go to dictionary.com. Look up the word "spandex". Now look up every word that is used in the definition for spandex. Now look up all the words in those definitions. Continue until you arrive at the platonic form (I don't actually expect you to do this...). Because humans understand (if that word can be used) everything linguistically, no objective (God, platonic form, etc.) exists, for all practical purposes, to give meaning to this never-ending referential chain. The substance of meaning is always postponed.
After reading this you can hardly claim to understand deconstruction. But that's OK. Deconstruction is not meant to be understood... [Editorial sequel is coming].
In physics, this sort of thing is seen in relativity. You can tell people a bunch of facts about the subject, but until you actually give the equations and teach them to apply them the way they are applied by those who have already learned it, they inevitably carry around huge misconceptions about the theory.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, along this line, you would probably enjoy the book "Gravity's Shadow", which is nonfiction about the academic fight over gravity waves and Joe Weber. In a certain sense, it is a story about the sociology of physics. Since physics is supposed to be so far from a social science, this makes it an interesting read, along the lines of what you are discssing.
And what it really boils down to is worse than just that words cannot convey meaning. It's that even among the experts in a field, most of what they know they know not based on personal understanding, but instead based on their hearing someone else claim to understand it. They judge things based on their estimate of the reliability of the person who gives them the information (which of course cannot carry the true description that was intended and needed).
Carlbrannen,
ReplyDeleteThough no physicist, I encountered the misconceptions you are talking about in a friend of mine. The term "Relativity" pushes all the wrong theological/philosophical/cultural buttons. The first time I seriously encountered Relativity theory, the concepts and equations were side by side. I think this helped me get past my presuppositions.
As I said, I'm no physicist. Do you think this same problem floods over into teaching/understanding quantum theory?
I will look up that book. Thanks for your comment. I'm not qualified to comment on your articles. I don't know enough physics.
-Hudson
Of course QM is misunderstood, but in a different way.
ReplyDeleteEven PhDs in physics misunderstand relativity and quantum mechanics, unless it happens to be that their PhD is in the area of the foundations of physics. In general, the misunderstanding among professionals is to assume that (a) the foundations are very solid, and (b) there is only one reasonable interpretation.
The book on Gravity will explain how this comes about fairly well, at least for relativity. The author is also responsible for a bunch of other eye openers. For instance, physicist don't actually read the vast majority of physics articles except in a very cursory manner. And their first glance is at the authors to see if they are famous. If they're not, they're very likely to ignore it.
Oh my, deconstruction.
ReplyDeleteI feel the same as you about leaving my similar box six feet under. But a nice, neat summary of deconstruction nonetheless.
After I managed to get my head around the aspects of deconstruction that I was responsible for, I grew to like it. However, I had the easier set; not differance or any of that heavy philosophical mumbo jumbo. I'll leave that to you philosophers.
Grand job with what you did, and I'm grateful for your guidance on our work.