To understand deconstruction, we first need to know what it's purpose is.
The Purpose of deconstruction is to undercut the ideas, beliefs, words, ideologies, art and discourses of our civilization by attacking their MEANING.
Read that again because it's important.
Now, everything we do (relationships, work, school, politics...everything) we do based on our ideas and understanding of the world, and our ideas and understanding of the world are built from such things as concepts, beliefs, words, ideologies, art and discourses.
If a set of ideas and a way of understanding of the world provide the blueprint for a society, then you can tear down that society by destroying it's blueprint. You do that by destroying the IDEAS and understanding of the world used to create that societies blueprint.
So how does deconstruction work?
Deconstruction operates by attacking at the level of MEANING. What gets deconstructed are words, ideas, ideologies, concepts, discourses, art, texts, symbols, etc. Whatever can be used to MEAN something or communicate gets deconstructed. Why?
Because if you destroy the MEANING of ideas (or the concepts that make up or communicate those ideas) you can suck the power out of those ideas. If ideas lose their power, whatever is held together by those ideas (in this case our society) will begin to come apart...
Consider capitalism:
The person who “deconstructs” capitalism is attempting to attack the concepts, beliefs, and ideas which power capitalism. Why? Because if the concepts that are used to create an communicate about capitalism lose their power then capitalism falls apart.
In the same way that a person who loses faith in Jesus will stop going to church, a person who does not see the value in liberal democracy will cease to care about or defend it. People defend things that have MEANING to them, and MEANING is what deconstruction attacks.
Jacques Derrida, the father of Deconstruction, had a core group of tactics and ideas that make up his concept of deconstruction. I can't list them all here (this is twitter not a full fledged academic journal 😂) but I'll give a brief outline of the main ideas
Derrida said words had "traces" ( a sort of linguistic residue) of other words because words define each other. So the word Cat contains traces of "cute" furry" "small" etc. Thus you can consider the “traces” of a word when interpreting what that word means in a given context
Derrida's next idea was sometimes meaning comes from what is missing. Think of an archivist deciding which things to archive and which things to throw out. You can learn something about the archivist by what he leaves out, what is "absent" from the archive tells us something
The intent of the author, does not decide what the meaning of a text is. Consider a postcard. You can understand a postcards meaning even if you don’t know who wrote it. Derrida thought this showed you don't need to know what the authors intent was to grasp the meaning
Add all this up and see what happens.
The theory of traces means I can say "you're a racist for saying you prefer white shirts to black shirts, To not like a black shirt is rooted in not liking the concept of black. and African Americans are black, which you don't like"
The theory of meaning from what's missing (absence) means one can say
"you're racist because only white people were at your wedding."
"I only invited family. My family's white"
"So what? By not going out of your way to invite a non-white person you were excluding non-whites"
Saying the author's intent is irrelevant to a text's meaning means anyone can misinterpret me and claim that I said something I never said. Why? Cause their interpretation of what I said is as good as mine. I can't say"that's not what I meant" because my intent doesn't matter
And if the meaning of an idea is unclear you suck the power out of the idea, and that's the point. One thing which gives an idea power is that it can be acted on. However, if an idea is not clear enough to be acted on then it loses all it’s power.
Get the picture?
When the woke aren't mocking ideas so no one takes them seriously, they muddy the waters by re-interpreting, or decontextualizing or recontextualizing ideas to blur their meaning. This makes ideas less clear, making it hard to organize around them.
Now that you know the tactic, call it out. You don't need to play along.
Reject their stupid word games.
When they mock you stand firm.
When they re-interpret you to make you look racist push back.
Postmodern Deconstruction is a dishonest and unfair game.
Don't play.
/fin