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Can you explain deconstruction? What is an example? What field finds it useful?

this is about deconstruction theory applied to written works.

If you will indulge me for a moment, let me begin with a quote from a book I am writing, which includes a not entirely serious account of Deconstruction as follows:

"Remember how tedious it was to read those stupid scenarios called word problems in the Algebra books?

'If Gregg lives in a Colonial duplex on Maple Street and is walking to Sally??s house, which is a large Tudor mansion six miles away, and he is walking two miles an hour, how long will it take him to get to Sally??s house so he can ask her to the prom?'

Some of the duller among us are still following red herrings like the suggestion of social inequality and symbolic distance between the duplex and the mansion. They call getting off the track like this Deconstruction. It is French, and a vulgar form of Marxism in which you can never get to an answer like ??3 hours?? (or any other kind of answer, for that matter), but must spend your reading time looking for small excuses in the text for persevering in worn out categories of class struggle.

This method of deliberately ignoring the point was invented by a philosopher named Jacques Derrida. He, and those who came after him, talked endlessly about MARGINS.

Margins fall into two categories: bad margins, where all the people society doesn??t care for go, and good margins where critics who can??t write poetry write about it.

Call me overly optimistic, but I think theories should be aimed at ways to get answers. Deconstruction seems to be aimed at getting non-answers with respect to any question as to what the text it addresses might be about."

Okay. Now, to be a little more serious, Deconstruction is an idea about how to read put forth by Jacques Derrida and his followers. They worked in the field of linguistics during the last half of the twentieth century and were part of a predominantly Swiss school of philosophy that was influenced by the Communist schools of Structuralism and Post-Structuralism. (Don't ask...) They used the tools of cultural linguistics to show that language was intrinsically political.

Literature was the field where most of the work of Deconstruction was done. But I have actually sat through a very bad, hour long paper delivered by a colleague of mine who "deconstructed" his phone bill, and believed that he had demonstrated how Ma Bell was a "coercive and terrorist organization." To be fair, there have been plenty of deconstructionists who weren't that silly.

There was a lot of what I call "lingo" connected with Deconstruction, which was considered very exciting during the eighties. Words such as "trace" and "residue," were good examples. They referred to a general idea in Deconstruction that the agenda of the writer and the writer's biases in any piece of writing would appear in ways that the reader who was looking for it could pick up.

Deconstruction also, and more interestingly, discussed the idea that where there was a word, the thing it referred to was not there. How words stand for things was one of the more reasonable and legitimately philosophical areas of inquiry in Deconstruction.

There were various claims for which nineteenth/twentieth century philosophers were influential in the movement, but that would all be way beyond anything manageable here.

When Deconstruction came to America, there was a group of critics at Yale University who picked up on it. The two most important names there were Harold Bloom and Paul deMan. Bloom is still writing, and one of the most influential of all critics of his time. Among other, and possibly greater things, he was the one who came up with the idea that the problem for all critics was that they weren't writing poetry, they were writing about poetry in the margins around it. He handled the philosophical (not to mention professional and personal) problem of the inferiority of the critic to his subject by proposing that the anxiety the critic feels about not being a poet may become intense enough to turn him into a poet.

Paul deMan took the position that all language is metaphorical. It was through analysing the relationships of metaphors in literary texts that he brought out their underlying agendas, and meanings that even their authors may not have intended.

They essential point of both approaches, however, was the same: it was not reading, but MIS-reading a text that made the critic a poet and the poet a critic.

As it turned out, Bloom is a Jew and Paul deMan was at one point in his life a Nazi. Go figure. But they both moved Deconstruction away from its roots in the basest form of Marxism and into the relationship of writers to their works, which was a lot more "literary" to my way of thinking than the French.

There is so much on this topic that I can't possibly cover it here. I just happen to be a great fan of both Bloom and deMan. As for Derrida, the founder of the school, he was a strange duck, too. I attended a lecture he gave, which turned into two days of lectures, and ultimately into one of his most famous, and perhaps last works. I never bothered to read it, because the whole two days he kept talking about "spooks," referring I think to the ethos in certain works of literature. He was a very beautiful and silly little man.