Think in multiplicity

Derrida emphasizes the affirmative character of deconstruction, the ethics of deconstruction.


Deconstruction is not an enclosure in nothingness (a sort of gratuitous chess game), but an openness towards the other ... an otherness that has been dissimulated or appropriated by the logocentric tradition ... The very activity of thinking, which lies at the basis of epistemological, ontological, and veridical comprehension, is the reduction of plurality to unity and alterity to sameness ... To think philosophically is to comprehend, to include, to seize, to grasp and master the other, thereby reducing its alterity.

Deconstruction may therefore be understood as the desire to keep open a dimension of alterity which can neither be reduced, comprehended, nor, strictly speaking, even thought by philosophy' (Kearney, p.123-4, my italics). The crucial 'methodological' point is that it is possible to discern the operations of different ways of meaning simultaneously. To think in multiplicity. Derrida's argument is that the unconditional arises as the interruption, or non-closure, of any determinate context.

See Cobussen

David Kolb and deconstruction

Sometimes when this problem of using hypertext in philosophy is discussed, there is a tendency to think that hypertext is useful when there is a sort of deconstruction of the linear form. What is your opinion about this relation about hypertext and deconstruction?

David Kolb - It is a complex issue. You could summarise by saying that in many ways hypertext shows that the things which deconstructive literary theorists and philosophers have been saying about texts are true. It is shows that texts are open, that they cannot be completely closed, that they cannot be completely dominated by the author, that meaning has a certain contingent way of arising, so that it is not totally under the control of anyone, reader or author; those things hypertext demonstrates very rapidly. But it is also true that hypertext stands somewhat opposed to some of the things that are said by deconstructive writers because, in fact, a hypertext is a network, a finite set of relationships; it is something made, it is an artefact. I think many of the authors who sing the praises of hypertext as somehow "the native language of deconstruction" are making a confusion. They are forgetting that there is no pure text, that any kind of presentation, any kind of writing, brings the sort of general textuality they are taking about down to a concrete mode of presentation. There is a dream, after all, of total freedom. There is a dream of a permanent avant-garde situation in writing, but I think the flag of hypertext seems like something that might lead you in the direction of that dream. But only in the direction: the dream is impossible by itself.

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Bad hypertextuality

One also has to consider a darker alternative to hypertextual writing.

If it is possible to imagine academic hypertext as an open system, one can also posit a hypertext project governed by arbitrary rules, hostile to innovation, and largely opaque to its users. Such a system, conceived perhaps on the model of the "learning machines" of previous decades, might present itself as a hypertextbook containing all the information a student 'really' needs to know. The student's paths through this information would be limited to a narrow range governed by binary evaluations: 'if the reader understands this concept then proceed to the next one; otherwise repeat.'

Such a system would be a monolith of integrated knowledge. Its navigators (if there were any) would not be trail blazers or generalists but park police and drill sergeants.
The system would not be hyper-"Text" in Roland Barthes' terms, but hyper-"work" -- a code of received knowledge designed to engrave its idea of order upon the reader.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -

PHONEREADER Library - - Jean-Philippe Pastor