![]() ![]() The Western philosophical tradition has denigrated writing as an inferior copy of the spoken word. The fact that we have produced a concept of ‘nature’ in opposition to ‘culture’ is a symptom of our alienation from the ecological systems that civilisation depletes and transforms.Ī crucial opposition for deconstruction is speech/writing. It’s a fantasy to conceive of the non-human environment as a pristine, innocent setting fenced off and protected from the products of human endeavour-cities, roads, farms, landfills. ![]() The idea of ‘nature’ depends on the idea of ‘culture’, and yet culture is part of nature. Consider, for example, the opposition between nature and culture. ‘Deconstruction’ takes apart such oppositions by showing how the devalued, empty concept lives inside the valued, positive one. In the realm of aesthetics, the original work of art traditionally has carried an aura of authenticity that its copy lacks, and the telling of a story or the taking of a photograph is viewed as a passive record of events. For example, the Judeo-Christian tradition has conceived the body as an external shell for the inner soul, elevating the mind as the sacred source of thought and spirit, while denigrating the body as mere mechanics. The intellectual achievements of the West – its science, art, philosophy, literature – have valued one side of these pairs over the other, allying one side with truth and the other with falsehood. ![]() How does the external image of things get inside their internal essence? How does the surface get under the skin? Western culture since Plato, Derrida argues, has been governed by such oppositions as reality/representation, inside/outside, original/copy, and mind/body. In Derrida’s theory, deconstruction asks how representation inhabits reality. Deconstruction, like critical strategies based on Marxism, feminism, semiotics, and anthropology, focuses not on the themes and imagery of its objects but rather on the linguistic and institutional systems that frame the production of texts. Deconstruction rejected the project of modern criticism: to uncover the meaning of a literary work by studying the way its form and content communicate essential humanistic messages. ‘Deconstruction’ became a banner for the advance guard in American literary studies in the 1970s and 80s, scandalising departments of English, French, and comparative literature. Jacques Derrida introduced the concept of ‘deconstruction’ in his book Of Grammatology, published in France in 1967 and translated into English in 1976. It is embedded in recent visual and academic culture, but it describes a strategy of critical form-making which is performed across a range of artefacts and practices, both historical and contemporary. Deconstruction belongs to both history and theory. We argue that deconstruction is not a style or ‘attitude’ but rather a mode of questioning through and about the technologies, formal devices, social institutions, and founding metaphors of representation. We then consider the place of graphics within the theory of deconstruction, initiated in the work of philosopher Jacques Derrida. This essay looks at the reception and use of deconstruction in the recent history of graphic design, where it has become the tag for yet another period style. Since the surfacing of the term ‘deconstruction’ in design journalism in the mid-1980s, the word has served to label architecture, graphic design, products, and fashion featuring chopped up, layered, and fragmented forms imbued with ambiguous futuristic overtones. ![]()
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