A friend of mine recently posted two links to a discussion list we’re both on, and much like whenever a vaguely philosophical concept gets posted to the list, I’ve jumped for the bait, just the way I can’t get trout to do. I’ll post my thoughts here, because it might be interesting to reach a somewhat wider audience, particularly if people post comments – hint, hint.
Deconstructionalism is the topic of two articles I mentioned, as well as the topic of this post. Here are the links:
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/french-theory-in-america/
http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/french-theory-in-america-part-two/
As a very brief recap for those of you who didn’t read the above two links, or simply found your eyes glazing over, Deconstructionalism is a way of looking at the world. Its defining characteristic is to claim that any attempt to separate us, as human beings, as knowers independent of the world, is incoherent and bound to fail. Our human existence and thought processes always stand between us and our understanding of the world. “Truth,†as commonly thought of, is essentially inaccessible – our act of perceiving and reflecting upon the world serves as an intermediate step between us and that world. The terms we use to define the world are made by us, and reflect our own preconceived notions – in the language of Deconstructionalism, they are “socially constructed†- as much (or more than) they reflect the world.
For many of you with an education in the sciences, the above paragraph will likely raise all kinds of red flags – I’m making claims about “truth†that you’re probably ideologically committed to rejecting. For many of those of you with an education in the humanities, you’re seeing red flags because you think I have incoherently tried to address a topic to which my paragraph does not do justice – either because a paragraph isn’t enough space, or far too much! I see the view presented as liberating – the way I see it, adopting it’s mediated view of truth it frees me from the pursuit of a “right answer,†to acceptance of a “best answer.â€
“OH NOES!†some of you cry. “He’s been infected by touchie-feelie postmodernist crap!†Maybe, maybe not, but it’s not my experience in the single English course I’ve taken, nor the few Philosophy courses, but my education in Computer Science and Physics. Without going into too much detail, both fields set some definite limits on human knowledge. Physics has it’s Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which sets hard and fast rules about what we can know about a given particle; not because we’re dumb or because our instruments aren’t good enough, but because in a very real sense we can’t know – physical law makes it impossible. Likewise, in Computer Science, we have the Halting Problem. The Halting Problem is the fact that a computer cannot tell if it’s entered an infinite loop, and at least as long as we continue to build computers based on the model of computing laid out by Alan Turing and Alonzo Church early last century, we’re stuck with the problem.
Ok, this is all well and good, but what does it have to do with everyday life? Plenty, I find. Diagnosing a failing hard drive is something I often find myself doing. In point of fact, most of the time, I can’t tell you exactly how the drive has failed. Has the motor driving the read arm failed? Has the motor that spins the platter failed? Has the circuitry that supplies power to those two motors failed? In almost every case, I couldn’t tell you. However, liberated of the need to know that, I can tackle other questions – what, if anything can I do to help the client? Generally, the client only wants to know if I can get his or her data back, and not the particulars of exactly how the drive failed, and I’d only bore him or her, even if I were to have the exact physical explanation they wanted.
Managing people is something I was never really taught how to do, but it’s something I find myself doing every day. “Truth†is inaccessible to me; I never really know how my words affect the other person. Did he understand my explanation? Does she know why I praised her? In the end, I can’t know – I guess, and hope I guess correctly – that my words and deeds will have the desired effects, that the effects I think I want are actually helpful, that I have an effect at all. In many ways, I find working with humans far more challenging than even the trickiest electro-mechanical devices. Oftentimes, I get only one shot. If I make the wrong judgment, the damage is done, and I can mitigate but never really fix the problem. Under what conditions should I fire people? Every time a rule is broken, or only the major ones, or only when they’re broken in a blatant way, or… and I suppose the uncertainty drives my particular management style. I always ask myself, “Is this worth losing a student, and in particular, this student, over?†and make my decision based on that. Maybe that’s overly cautious. Maybe it’s outright cowardly. Maybe it denies the student a chance to learn that breaking rules often has unfortunate consequences. But, tied as I am to my uncertainty, to my doubt that my workplace rules are even coherent if applied unthinkingly, that in the end I am always a mediating force, applying meaning to rules based on my own, rooted-in-myself understanding of what’s best.
Of course, there’s much more to Deconstructionalism that I’m either ignoring in this post for the sake of making my point, or else of which I’m simply ignorant. I’m waiting for Some Random English Major to charge in with guns blazing and tell the world (or at least, all 5 people who read my website) just how wrong I am.
And that’s ok. “Wrong†is… wait for it… socially constructed!