The Deconstructive Impulse

Over the past few weeks, reflecting on what I've read and my own growing habits and means of analyzing the information I come across, I've noticed what could be called the deconstructive impulse. It exists in every human who can rationally reflect and think. It consists in the ability and propensity to take a sign and lay bare its constitutive elements and dynamics, that is, to split apart the signifier from the signified from its grounding or fundamental relation that connects the two and makes sense of the sign at all. The effect, in most cases, is what we commonly experience as irony, sarcasm, and other forms of wit or verbal humor. But it can be put to other use as well.

We see it in fictional culture, such as extended discussions on the credibility of a fiction narrative, whether in print or on screen—that is, whether we can "suspend our disbelief." We see it in politics, especially during campaigning, in which we either establish or disprove the supposed signified purity and integrity of the campaigning politician. Similarly, in modeling and beauty culture, including its underworld of the sex trade, pornography industry, and paparazzi, we obsess over every culturally-conditioned indicator of beauty or its lack. We see it in online culture, where a debate may go on and on uselessly over issues of "semantics" and "axioms" or "first principles." We see it in philosophy and the social sciences when both the experts and amateurs either try to establish a metanarrative or pull it apart and show its falsity, infeasibility, or inadequacy.

The impulse empowers the cynic and critic alike. Young adults and adolescents in particular savor the magic wand of this impulse as they cast off the oppressive, backwater, antiquated notions of their forebears. It is fundamental to our very status as sign-conscious beings, or "rational animals" as Aristotle called it. This impulse is a function of our ability to grasp the sign relationship and the essences of things.

And perhaps it is part of our desire for finality, satiation in the Word, Who is the final word on everything but simultaneously inexhaustible, beyond total comprehension, and in other words, infinite.