It has to be admitted that Decon has a unique kind of power: the ability to consume and destroy perfectly good brains. It goes that even one better, because it also fills that brain with feverish excitement, a kind of exhilaration at the spectacle of its own self-destruction. Here, Salingaros gives us an almost admiring appreciation of the distinctive power of Decon.

Introduction.

Since the 1960s, deconstruction has sought to undermine all well-ordered structures. “Deconstruction is a method of analyzing texts based on the idea that language is inherently unstable and shifting and that the reader rather than the author is central in determining meaning. It was introduced by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the late 1960s.” (Encarta World English Dictionary, 1999). This means that texts have no ultimate meaning, and that their interpretation is up to readers. Thus, deconstruction pretends to be a call of liberation from the hegemony of certainty.

It needs something ordered (either actual or latent) on which to act and then destroy. Thus, it is entirely parasitic. With one notable exception, what its advocates say about deconstruction is clouded by confusion. Since it is an attack on logic, it does not produce logical statements. According to Derrida: “All sentences of the type ‘deconstruction is X’ or ‘deconstruction is not X’ a priori miss the point, which is to say that they are at least false. One of the principal things in deconstruction is the delimiting of ontology and above all of the third person present indicative: S is P.” (Collins & Mayblin, 1996; p. 93).

Deconstruction can, however, be understood by what it actually does. It dismantles structure, logical statements, traditional beliefs, observations, etc. When criticized for dismantling these entities, deconstructionists insist they are merely analyzing and commenting on text. This approach resembles the way viruses survive and proliferate.

Derrida himself has called deconstruction a “virus”: i. e. an inert code that replicates itself by using a host. Its strategy is to make an unsuspecting host ingest it; to force the host’s internal machinery to make new copies of the virus; and to spread as many of these copies as possible, in order to maximize the possibility of infecting new hosts. The virus requires a more complex host to invade and destroy, but cannot live by itself. Originating in France, deconstruction has “infected” most disciplines in universities everywhere. In an uncharacteristically clear statement, Derrida states his objectives: “All I have done … is dominated by the thought of a virus, what could be called a parasitology, a virology, the virus being many things … The virus is in part a parasite that destroys, that introduces disorder into communication. Even from the biological standpoint, this is what happens with a virus; it derails a mechanism of the communicational type, its coding and decoding…[it] is neither alive nor dead … [this is] all that I have done since I began writing.” (Brunette & Wills, 1994; p. 12). Fortunately, since most people cannot understand it, it has influenced society only indirectly (Part 7).

Deconstruction erases normal ways of thinking. It may appear incomprehensible, but it is very effective: it erases associations that form coherent thoughts. It acts like a computer virus that erases information in a hard disk. The Derrida virus seeks to undermine any original meaning via a complex and entirely self-referential play of words (Scruton, 2000). Otherwise astute critics have made the mistake of dismissing Derrida as another obfuscating French philosopher. Yet, what he has introduced is much more dangerous. He turns knowledge into randomness, just as a virus destroys living organisms by disintegrating individual cells. Its properties can be summarized as follows:

    1. The virus is a very small amount of information encoded either as a list of instructions to follow or as examples to copy.
    2. Within an appropriate host, the virus directs the partial disintegration of order and connectivity in the host structure.
    3. The virus then directs the reassembly of portions of the host structure, but in a way that denies connections necessary to achieve coherence or life.
    4. The end product must encode the virus in its structure.
    5. A deconstructed prodect is the vehicle for transmission of the viral code to the next host.

Deconstruction has been remarkably successful in dismantling traditional literature, art, and architecture. Like a biological virus, deconstruction is careful to balance host survival with infectivity. It only partially destroys its host, because total destruction would stop further transmission. It breaks up coherent sets of ideas by separating natural modules into submodules. Some of these submodules are then selectively destroyed in order to subsequently reattach their components randomly into an incoherent construct. A variant of the Derrida virus does not attack a specific text, but scavenges a discipline as a whole. It works on the collected work of many authors dealing with a particular topic. Its components are then reassembled in a nonsensical jumble that is only misleadingly and superficially coherent and appears viable to those unfamiliar with the host discipline and its vocabulary.

Deconstructive Architecture.

Deconstruction’s most visible manifestation is in architecture, in a building style characterized by broken, jagged, and lopsided forms, evoking physical destruction. According to David Watkin’s “A History of Western Architecture” (2000; p. 674): “The leading architects of the populist yet aggressive architecture of Deconstructivism are Peter Eisenman, Frank Gehry, Daniel Libeskind, Rem Koolhaas and the latter’s pupil, the Iraqi-born Zaha Hadid.” Architectural theory has embraced deconstruction in order to reverse architecture’s main raison d’être: to provide viable shelter. Deconstructionists claim that deconstruction is just another design style, and, as such, has a right to be articulated.

But alienating architectural structures can do far more damage than confused academics churning out nonsense. In infecting contemporary architecture, the Derrida virus attacks a form’s internal organization and coherence, leaving forms embodying disorganized complexity. It has migrated from high-profile buildings to infect more mundane commercial structures, such as office buildings, hospitals, and stores. Since deconstructivists avoid any self-definition, most deconstructive architects deny being deconstructivists (Jencks, 1988; pp. 49-61). This may be due to the fact that architects do not like being branded with a particular label, or admit that they have changed their minds.

In the 1980s, Derrida worked with Peter Eisenman on a project for the Parc de La Villette, in Paris. It was to be a small garden embodying de-ontologized nonspace (whatever that means), but fortunately it was never built. What Derrida said about the design demonstrates the anti-architectural position of deconstruction: “[It’s a critique of] everything that subordinated architecture to something else — the value of, let’s say, usefulness or beauty or living … not in order to build something else that would be useless or ugly or uninhabitable, but to free architecture from all those external finalities, extraneous goals … to contaminate architecture … I think that Deconstruction comes about … when you have deconstructed some architectural philosophy, some architectural assumptions — for instance, the hegemony of the aesthetic, of beauty, the hegemony of usefulness, of functionality, of living, of dwelling. But then you have to reinscribe these motifs within the work.” (Norris, 1989).

Architecture’s goals happen to be precisely what Derrida rejects: aesthetics, beauty, usefulness, functionality, living, and dwelling. They are its very foundation, absolutely essential and hardly extraneous to its practice. Architecture was never really subordinated to anything else; it arises out of and is an expression of human needs.

Deconstruction applied to buildings removes their architectural qualities, while “reinscribing” a useless and superficial semblance of order that appears only as abstract motifs. Even Derrida concedes that what he has in mind for architecture is not architecture as such. What he proposes is an architecture of death for the new millennium.

In a talk published by Eisenman’s wife, Derrida says: “Now, if I were forced to stop here and to say what the architecture of the next millennium should be, I would say: in its type, it should be neither an architecture of the subject nor an architecture of Dasein [being; existence; life]. But then, perhaps, it will have to give up its name of architecture, which has been linked to these different, but somehow continuous ways of thinking. Indeed, perhaps it is already losing its name, perhaps architecture is already becoming foreign to its name.” (Derrida, 1991). (On “the architecture of life” and “the architecture of death”, see Part 5).

An architecture that reverses structural algorithms so as to create disorder — the same algorithms that in an infinitely more detailed application generate living form — ceases to be architecture. Deconstructivist buildings are the most visible symbols of actual deconstruction. The randomness they embody is the antithesis of nature’s organized complexity. This is despite effusive praise in the press for “exciting” new academic buildings, such as the Peter B. Lewis Management Building at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, the Vontz Center for Molecular Studies at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, and the Stata Center for Computer, Information, and Intelligence Sciences at MIT, all by Frank Gehry. Housing a scientific department at a university inside the symbol of its nemesis must be the ultimate irony.

Otherwise knowledgeable clients — including academics — have been seduced to commission tortuous buildings in the deconstructivist style. There are fellow architects who proudly proclaim the virtues of a new university building by a famous deconstructivist architect, such as the Aronoff Center for Design and Art at the University of Cincinnati by Peter Eisenman. At the same time, ordinary people consider it ugly, odd-looking, and senseless (Radel, 1996).

An example of this vanguard deconstructivist architectural style is Frank Gehry’s celebrated New Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, which represents an unnatural imposition of free-flowing ribbon forms sheathed in a continuous, shiny metal skin. Besides the deliberate disorientation, which it produces visually through absence of a vertical, Gehry has eliminated or randomized components that would otherwise contribute to coherence. A repeating form in the vertical or horizontal directions (or possibly both) ties a large surface together visually. Thus, in Classical and Modernist buildings windows are lined up so as to provide translational symmetry. In other instances, rotational symmetry ties windows together on some of the gorgeous Medieval Cathedral fronts; otherwise it is used on the plan of a circular building.

Gehry’s Bilbao Museum dispenses with components altogether. There is no translational or rotational symmetry. Similar is the case with an office building in Prague also designed by Gehry, where the windows are carefully misaligned in both vertical and horizontal directions, as well as in their depth and attachment to the façade (which itself is strangely distorted for no apparent reason), and their internal structure made inconsistent so as to avoid coherence. (This is known as the “Ginger & Fred” building). Gehry explains: “I worked very hard trying to devise a window that looked like it was attacking the form … I thought of it like a swarm of bees coming at a wall.” (Friedman, 1999; p. 210). Gehry also reversed the natural progression of small to large as elements approach the ground, so that the windows actually get larger as they get higher.

The sense of incoherence is reinforced by the lack of substructure at decreasing scales (Alexander, 2002; Salingaros, 1998). Gehry avoids any scaling similarity by using smooth metallic skin (Salingaros, 2000a). In his Prague office building, each window could be roughly similar to the entire façade when scaled up by a factor of 10, but this is far too large a factor for the two scales to connect visually and thus generate a certain coherence, so the two scales remain visually disconnected (Alexander, 2002; Salingaros, 1998; 2000a).

In the 1920s, modernist architects who were driven by an ideological fanaticism to dismantle the world’s architectural traditions used industrial materials. Gehry uses them for the same disconnecting purpose. For example, his Prague office building has two towers — one solid and the other glass. Glass walls and polished metal surfaces generate anxiety, because the eye cannot focus on the surface — the former is transparent, whereas the latter is mirror reflective. In addition, such surfaces do not produce any sensory input from touching. Industrial surfaces are alien to nature and therefore hostile to the touch. This effect is by no means limited to a strictly sensual reaction, but is due to visual and tactile perception of the material surfaces’ microstructure.

Some contemporary art long ago graduated from avant-garde silliness, to launch an aggressive attack on aesthetics. Invoking physical revulsion — in a clever ploy to emotionally validate its nonexistent content — was a way for artists to attract media attention. This is reflected in the architecture of the new museums, which explains their puzzling resemblance to memorials to mass murder. Thus, the same design approach is applied by Daniel Libeskind in his Jewish Museum in Berlin (which commemorates the Holocaust), and to his proposed extension for the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The playful innovations by a small group of architects riding a wave of stylistic fashion for fame and profit are neither benign nor innocent. Alarmingly, other museums are planning new additions to house genuine art in such uncompromisingly hostile environments (Part 5). These architects erect huge deconstructivist symbols everywhere, thus becoming instrumental in propagating the virus.

When all is said and done, deconstruction in architecture is merely a continuation — after a lengthy pause — of the 1920s’ Constructivist movement, exemplified by Konstantin Melnikov’s Rusakov Club for the Transport Worker’s Union in Moscow, and Vladimir Tatlin’s unbuilt Monument to the Third International Communist Congress. The post-revolutionary Russian avant-garde married radical politics to a style of broken architecture. It is hard to find intentional dislocation in architecture before the Constructivist movement (and its contemporary, the Bauhaus movement in Germany). In “A Dictionary of Architecture” (1999; pp. 162-163), James Stevens Curl defines this movement as follows: “Constructivism: Anti-aesthetic, anti-art, supposedly pro-technology, Left-wing movement originating in the USSR … Russian Constructivism’s anti-environmentalist aspects, jagged overlapping diagonal forms, expression of mechanical elements, have proved to be potent precedents … for the followers of Deconstructivism, notably Hadid, Koolhaas, and Libeskind.”

Deconstructivist buildings resemble ruins whose structure has been somehow violated: Warsaw, Dresden and Hiroshima immediately after their bombing; buildings after a major earthquake; Manhattan after 9/11, etc.

These structures encode their physical violation in what remains of their destroyed form, and this quality is sought by some deconstructivist architects. Industrial materials tend to produce jagged, fragmented ruins that remain so because they weather very poorly or not at all. But the weathering of natural materials generates an altogether different type of ruin; one in which time and nature — often helped by human interventions at reinforcing and partially restoring what is left of the structure — try to minimize the form’s violation.

Derrida’s virus infected contemporary architecture even before the latest deconstructivist fashion. Its impact can be seen in “postmodernist” buildings (popular between 1965 and 1985, and thus contemporary with deconstruction’s spread in philosophy and literature). These are marked by the reassembly of non-cooperating but identifiable architectural elements. That is exactly what the Derrida virus does when it acts on architecture as a whole, rather than dismantling a single concept for an individual building. It uses a haphazard repertory of pieces taken from various older buildings, historical styles, and materials, and carefully reassembles them in a manner that avoids combinatorial coherence.

Reactions to postmodernist buildings such as James Stirling’s Neue Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart are not as alarming as those to deconstructivist buildings, because the Derrida virus operates on fewer scales. The whole is disturbing in the way it is put together (actually, not put together), but the pieces seem unobjectionable and even attractive. Since smaller elements are themselves copied from genuine architectural styles, they tend to be coherent on their smaller, internal scales. In the postmodernist case, disorder is manifested only on the larger scale, which is incoherent. In the deconstructivist case, the Derrida virus acts on many different scales, so that even smaller architectural elements are randomized. Again, randomization needs to stop somewhere, otherwise the building becomes unusable. Unlike modernist architects, who work with a very restricted — though often strongly coherent — stylistic vocabulary, postmodernist architects are open to using a variety of architectural elements torn out of context from all periods. By rejecting any context, rather than working within any coherent style, postmodernist architects always chose to apply classical and other historical quotations with “ironic” intentions, never as genuine tectonic elements, and thus never attaining (by design) the balance and connectivity of traditional architecture.

After their initial infatuation with deconstruction, some architects have turned to other, weirder influences for design inspiration, such as blobs and folding. Yet, the pervasiveness of deconstruction has not allowed any genuinely adaptive architecture to emerge. The Derrida virus is still at work.

Many architects desperately try to innovate, while studiously avoiding human needs, because these point in the direction of traditional, pre-modernist architecture. Comfortable, pleasing architecture that resembles older non-modernist buildings is taboo for ideological reasons. It is vilified by the architectural establishment. This is the dark secret of contemporary architecture: a cover of questionable innovation hides a doctrine of hatred of traditional forms. Unfortunately, most people are ignorant of what goes on inside the closed architectural establishment.

The most disturbing development is cutting-edge architects, who profess to embrace the “New Sciences” predicated on buzzwords, such as fractals, complexity, emergence, chaos, self-organization, Darwinian processes, etc. (Part 3).

Trusting the Architectural Experts.

A biological virus has to overcome a cell’s defenses in order to enter it and manipulate it to produce copies of itself. The Derrida virus is one of many social viruses that act through human agents. People are predisposed to reject illogical belief systems that contradict common sense and intuition. They have built-in defenses against being taken over by destructive doctrines (although cults successfully override this mechanism). A telltale sign of cults trying to assume power is hearing that common sense is unreliable, and that “experts” should be trusted instead. Self-proclaimed experts present themselves as having superior knowledge, based on abstruse philosophical texts, written in an incomprehensible esoteric language. Any claims that experts possess intelligence and knowledge that contradict (rather than reinforce, extend, or, better, explain) our ordinary perception are classic setups for indoctrination.

A small group of promoters everywhere praise deconstructive buildings. Clients rely on them for advice in choosing fashionable architects. The media repeatedly turn to those same people for architectural criticism. They, again, sit on juries that award architectural prizes. They are all certified “experts,” who perpetuate a wave of architectural fashion by undermining commonsense public understanding of what is real and what makes sense. Having attracted attention, self-proclaimed architectural experts lash out at whatever threatens their ideals, namely traditional architecture that embodies traditional values. They label what they personally dislike to be old-fashioned, unexciting, retrograde, reactionary, dangerous, fascist, etc.

This reverses commonsense values, while calling for the extinction of all that is intuitively perceived as right (McFadyen, 2000).

Because of the costs of major architectural projects, the power politics played out in this arena can make or break people. It has nothing to do with style, but has always been that way because of economics. Contemporary architecture reveals a frightening picture of raw power, in which global architectural fashion is driven by a small group of power brokers (Brodie, 1991; Schulze, 1994). They influence the architectural media, decide on many of the major architectural commissions, and control who is appointed in key academic positions in architectural schools.

Architecture favors the propagation of almost any style, once a few well-placed people have adopted it. Boundless ambitions, an immense power base, various architects tied together by obligations, loyalty, mutual loathing, and the exchange of favors, threats, deals, and payoffs, shameless self-promotion, lucrative commissions — all of these elements constitute an unholy alliance that promotes a global architectural fashion. Now, this political machine is working to propagate the Derrida virus.

Deconstructive architecture was put on the map by an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, organized by Philip Johnson and Mark Wigley in 1988. While some of the architects featured there had already established their reputation, Johnson first brought them together under the common “Deconstructive” label, and launched that style on a global scale. The show included projects by Bernard Tschumi and the team Coop Himmelb(l)au (comprised of Wolf Prix and Helmut Zwiczinsky). This event had a tremendous effect in validating — or manufacturing — the new style, for it was the same Johnson who back in 1932 had launched the “International Style”, also by an exhibit of that name at the Museum of Modern Art. The modernist style went on to conquer the entire world, establishing Johnson as the power broker who defined the built environment for the better part of the 20th century. On that earlier occasion, Johnson’s assistant was Henry-Russell Hitchcock (Schulze, 1994).

In a striking parallel with the case of Paul de Man in literary deconstruction, Johnson, the figure instrumental in launching deconstructive architecture, was compromised by pro-Nazi sympathies as a young man. Eisenman claims that what motivated the then 82-year old Johnson to try his hand a second time at creating a new architectural style is that: “… he wants to go out … with a jump that puts him back in favor with the left, or what is thought to be left intellectually, in other words so he’s not seen as someone of the right … he has always been worried about the left and I think this is one time where he maybe is co-opting the left.” (Jencks, 1988; Sorkin, 1991).

Johnson had attended two Nazi political rallies where Hitler spoke (Potsdam in 1932 and Nuremberg in 1938), and followed the Wehrmacht when it invaded Poland — by invitation of the German Propaganda Ministry — as a correspondent for a right-wing American publication. This did not affect his standing within the architectural community. What is interesting here is not what Johnson did in his past, but rather what attracted him to deconstructive architecture. In a 1994 interview, Johnson said: “My philosophical outlook dates from a time and a way of thinking that differs from the liberal, acceptable, politically correct line that we all subscribe to today … There is no such thing as the good or the true or the beautiful. I’m a relativist. I’m a nihilist … I learned the German language, when I was young, because I was interested in reading Nietzsche … That’s why I was initially attracted to Hitler, who totally misunderstood Nietzsche, really. But there was enough similarity between them so I got very excited about it … The hierarchy of important things in the world starts with art, not with looking for truth, or science, or anything.” (Lewis & O’Connor, 1994; p. 175).

The catalogue for the Deconstructivist Architecture show at the Museum of Modern Art explains that: “Deconstructivist architecture disturbs figures from within … It is as if some kind of parasite has infected the form and distorted it from inside … The alien is an outgrowth of the very form it violates.” (Johnson & Wigley, 1988; pp. 16-17). This is the Derrida virus but, disingenuously, the catalogue denies any connection between the architectural style and Derrida’s philosophy. As Roger Kimball points out about this catalogue (1990; p. 136): “The lurid overtones of violence and corruption are intentional; they are, in fact, central to the ethos of deconstructive architecture … Disturb, torture, interrogate, contaminate, infect: these are the words[chosen] to explain and to praise deconstructivist architecture.”

This dangerous intellectual game is rooted in a nihilistic philosophy, and supported by an immense power base. To be fair to some architectural critics, they initially labeled deconstructivist architecture as nihilistic. Later on, however, they had to “toe the line” or be out of a job, so they are now among its most fervent supporters. Respected architects — who have previously demonstrated their skill in putting materials together to create a coherent, habitable form — are now calling for destruction (Varnelis, 1995).

A 1939 letter recounts Johnson’s impressions of the German invasion of Poland: “Everything was fine and dandy in Berlin when I left … I came again to the country that we had motored through, the towns north of Warsaw … The German green uniforms made the place look gay and happy. There were not many Jews to be seen. We saw Warsaw burn and Modlin being bombed. It was a stirring spectacle.” (Schulze, 1994; p. 139). Now, “stirring” is surely an odd term to describe destruction and slaughter on a massive scale. More that half a century later, his wartime memories still triggered the same sentiment: “… the burned-out village was in the Second World War, and I was on the wrong side. So we don’t talk about that anymore … But it was a horrifying sight … And it was so beautiful. That’s a horrible thing to say, but ruins are beautiful. You can’t help it. Fascination with ruins, it’s endless.” (Lewis & O’Connor, 1994; p. 33).

The Museum of Modern Art show was organized in 1988. By now, deconstructive architecture has gained its own momentum, and any questions raised about the circumstances of its birth are only of historical interest. Johnson may have given it a boost, but its current popularity is due to genuine client demand. Derrida responded to the charges that deconstructive architecture is a pure expression of nihilism. True to form, he employs the standard strategy of confusing the issue by dissolving the meaning of words: “And who knows what nihilism is or isn’t? Even the people who object don’t raise the question “What is nihilism?” … So when people say [Deconstruction] is negative, nihilistic and so forth, either they don’t read or they are arguing in bad faith.” (Norris, 1989; p. 10).

The Traditional Patrimony.

Some traditions are anachronistic and misguided, but as reservoirs of traditional solutions against which to check new proposals they are of immense importance. A new solution may at some point replace a traditional solution, but it must succeed in reestablishing the connections to the rest of knowledge. In the context of social patterns, architecture, and urbanism, new solutions are useful if they connect to traditional social, architectural, and urban patterns (i. e., all those before the 1920s). If there is an obvious gap where nothing in a discipline refers to anything outside, then there could be a serious problem.

Recently, Edward Wilson has introduced the notion of “consilience” as “the interlocking of causal explanations across disciplines” (Wilson, 1998a). Consilience claims that all explanations in nature are connected; there are no totally isolated phenomena. Wilson focuses on incomplete pieces of knowledge: the wide region separating the sciences from the humanities. He is happy to see it being slowly filled in by evolutionary biologists, cognitive neuroscientists, and researchers in artificial intelligence. At the same time, he is alarmed by people in the humanities who are erasing parts of the existing body of knowledge. These include deconstructive philosophers. Wilson characterizes their efforts as based on ignorance. On Derrida’s work, he writes: “It … is the opposite of science, rendered in fragments with the incoherence of a dream, at once banal and fantastical. It is innocent of the science of mind and language developed elsewhere in the civilized world, rather like the pronouncements of a faith healer unaware of the location of the pancreas.” (Wilson, 1998b; p. 41).

Unfortunately, most of the humanities today subscribe to belief systems that damage the web of consilient knowledge. Although never directly expressed, the goal of deconstruction is to erase institutions of knowledge. What Derrida has said is alarming enough: “Deconstruction goes through certain social and political structures, meeting with resistance and displacing institutions as it does so … effectively, you have to displace, I would say “solid” structures, not only in the sense of material structures, but “solid” in the sense of cultural, pedagogical, political, economic structures.” (Norris, 1989; p. 8).

Many people crave novelty without regard for possible consequences. This craving is often manipulated by unscrupulous individuals. Not everything that is novel is necessarily good. An example of this is a new, artificially-developed virus unleashed into the world. Because of the immense destructive power that humanity now possesses, it is imperative to understand possible consequences.

In a hilarious hoax, Alan Sokal developed a nonsensical deconstructive critique of well-known scientific claims in an article submitted for publication to a pretentious, deconstructive academic journal (Sokal, 1996). None of the referees for that journal challenged Sokal’s account before accepting the article as worthy of publication. Sokal was so obvious in his deception that he assumed it would have been exposed; but it was not. Subsequently, Sokal and Jean Bricmont (1998) exposed deconstructivist criticism as nonsensical and showed that several respected deconstructive texts are based on nonsensical scientific references. This is only the most famous exposure of nonsensical deconstructive writings; there are many others (Huth, 1998). In a debunking of deconstructivist texts, Andrew Bulhak codified the deconstructivists’ literary style into a computer program called “Postmodernism Generator” (1996). It is remarkably successful in generating nonsensical texts that are indistinguishable from those written by revered deconstructivist philosophers.

Putting aside the question of truthful content, a discipline is not valid unless it rests on a solid intellectual edifice. One characteristic of a coherent discipline is hierarchical complexity, in which correlated ideas and results define a unique internal structure. Like a valid bank note, this structure should be extremely difficult to counterfeit. That is not the case with deconstruction. Thus, a phony article in Statistical Mechanics, using all the appropriate words and mathematical symbols in a nice-sounding but scientifically-meaningless jumble, would be detected instantly.

Even a single mistake in such an article could not survive unnoticed. It is the function of referees to check each and every step in the argument of a scientific article submitted for publication in a professional journal. The very survival of the discipline depends on a system of checks that identifies and expels bogus contributions. By contrast, the survival of deconstruction — in which there is nothing to verify — depends upon generating more and more deconstructed texts and buildings.

A well-crafted deconstructive text does make sense, but not in any logical fashion. It is a piece of poetry that abuses the human capacity for pattern recognition to create associations, employing random technical jargon.

As Roger Scruton has pointed out: “Deconstruction … should be understood on the model of magic incantation. Incantations are not arguments, and avoid completed thoughts and finished sentences. They depend on crucial terms, which derive their effect from repetition, and from their appearance in long lists of cryptic syllables. Their purpose is not to describe what is there, but to summon what is not there … Incantations can do their work only if key words and phrases acquire a mystical penumbra.” (Scruton, 2000; pp. 141-142).

The use of words for emotional effect is a common technique of cult indoctrination. This practice reinforces the cult’s message. Whether in chants that make little sense yet can raise followers’ emotions to fever pitch, or in the speeches of political demagogues that rouse a wild and passionate allegiance, the emotional manipulation is the message. Even after the exposure of the deconstructive philosophers’ fraudulent character, their work continues to be taken seriously. Deconstructionist books are available in any university bookstore, while respectable academics offer lengthy critical commentary supporting these books’ supposed authority. By affording them the trappings of scholarly inquiry, the impression is carefully maintained that they constitute a valid body of work.

Followers of deconstruction apply the classic techniques of cults to seize academic positions; infiltrate the literature; displace competitors; establish a power base by employing propaganda and manipulating the media, etc. They use indoctrination to recruit followers, usually from among disaffected students in the humanities. As David Lehman put it: “An antitheological theology, [deconstruction] … shrouds itself in cabalistic mysteries and rituals as elaborate as those of a religious ceremony … it is determined to show that the ideals and values by which we live are not natural and inevitable but are artificial constructions, arbitrary choices that ought to have no power to command us. Yet, like a religion-substitute, deconstruction employs an arcane vocabulary seemingly designed to keep the laity in a state of permanent mystification. Putatively antidogmatic, it has become a dogma. Founded on extreme skepticism and disbelief, it attracts true believers and demands their total immersion.” (Lehman, 1991; p. 55).

The de Man Heritage and its Consequences.

In 1941, the late Paul de Man, the most accomplished literary deconstructivist, wrote some very direct, undeconstructed prose: “… despite the Semitic meddling into all aspects of European life … a solution to the Jewish question which envisions the creation of a Jewish colony isolated from Europe would not involve deplorable consequences for the literary life of the West. It would lose, all told, a few personalities of mediocre value … the war will only bring about a more intimate union of two things that have always been close, the Hitlerian soul and the German soul, until they have been made one single and unique power … the future of Europe can be envisioned only within the framework of the possibilities and needs of the German spirit … a people which finds itself called upon to exercise, in its turn, a hegemony in Europe.” (Kimball, 1990; pp. 96-97). These statements no longer shock, as they did when they were rediscovered after de Man’s death. Neither does the cover-up that followed his exposure.

Derrida (who is Jewish) tried to deconstruct de Man’s anti-Semitic and proNazi writings so that their original meaning was obscured by a fog of “interpretation”. Like a cult, deconstructivists closed ranks and vilified journalists who reported on the de Man case.

For Lehman, the danger of deconstructivism was demonstrated not merely by de Man’s youthful writings, but much more so by the denial brought into play by his surviving peers:

“How benign a method could[deconstruction] be if its proponents could so blatantly use it to explain away inconvenient facts and turn an unfortunate truth on its head? … Over this fallen idol the self-styled iconoclasts revealed themselves to be, after all, a thoroughly idolatrous crew.” (Lehman, 1990; pp. 242-243). Consider the following parallels. As with deconstruction, the Nazi concept of science was relative: Jewish scientists were excluded, whereas racial pseudo-scientists were legitimated. This attitude is overshadowed by the chillingly effective use the Nazis made of technology, and exemplifies nihilism, since it is predicated on an underlying duality of dominance/destruction. Thus, when he realized he was losing the war, Hitler ordered the leveling of Paris (which, fortunately, never happened).

In viral terms, infection occurs because the virus possesses an attractive shell, which it offers to its host. No host would knowingly allow a virus to enter it, but is invariably tricked into doing so. Biological viruses possess an exterior protein that the cell finds metabolically attractive, and so ingests them; some computer viruses are encapsulated in a message purportedly coming from a friend; the Derrida virus promises “liberation from oppressive hegemony”, itself a relic of the 1968 slogans in France.

This alternation of a destructive doctrine with a false promise of liberation is a recurring theme of revolutionary movements that have periodically scourged humanity. To the extent that it threatens to destroy everything else, deconstruction is not simply a worldview among others. Deconstruction takes advantage of a bad misunderstanding, which confuses multiculturalism with nihilism. A method to erase knowledge, masquerading as a new philosophical movement, cannot be quarantined within academia. Indoctrinated students eventually enter the real world threatening to create havoc.

Deconstruction involves a will to destroy. Much of it comes from absolutizing subjectivity. Shut off from the outside world, the individual is locked in an internal version of reality prone to corruption. Deconstruction seeks to achieve precisely this end: isolation, then corruption. Deconstruction isolates itself in order to protect its secret of a nonexistent content. It spins a cocoon of incomprehensibility as a defense mechanism. Unfortunately, modern physics set a dangerous precedent when it stopped making sense and no longer related to everyday experience. It made sense in a different dimension, a different scale in space and time, even though its observable consequences constitute the physical universe.

As a result, its legacy is that of formal systems that contradict common sense. Taking this as its point of departure, deconstruction devalues common sense and rejects customary wisdom. It declares everything that falls short of formal proof to be irrational, but then provides an irrational formal structure to replace what it has destroyed. As a virus, it has invaded civilization, erasing collective common sense while spreading with astonishing rapidity.

Once formed, worldviews are unlikely to change and are trusted more than any direct sensory evidence. These internal worldviews become so much a part of oneself that they are unlikely to undergo any modification, unless one is forced to do so. For this reason, those who have adopted a cult philosophy deny all evidence that threatens the cult’s vision of reality. Rational arguments make no difference. Jared Diamond (2003) asked: “Why do some societies make disastrous decisions?”. He was surprised to find that the most common answers assume that human beings have an innate reality check that prevents disastrous decisions. Yet, historically this has not been the case. Human beings seem inclined to fall into a kind of uncritical groupthink. The failure of the resulting group decisions has often led to the collapse of entire civilizations.

According to Diamond:

    1. Short-term gains often ignore possible long-term losses. A decision-making elite may advance its own interests to the detriment of society at large;
    2. People tend to be fanatically attached to irrational and self-serving beliefs, linking them to values they hold sacred; they tolerate no challenges and ignore their negative consequences;
    3. There is often denial of mounting evidence of a disaster because the truth, or coming events, are too horrible to contemplate;
    4. Signals pointing to a problem are not taken seriously. Previous disasters that arose under similar conditions are conveniently forgotten; society concentrates on the present and ignores its past;
    5. A novel threat is dismissed by assuming the continuity of a comfortable familiar situation (i. e., an unfounded belief in the inertia of the system), even knowing that change is often unexpected and discontinuous.

These indicators help to understand why deconstruction has been embraced so broadly.

Consider the case of architecture. The buildings of some deconstructivist architects have been called unusable, even by critics who usually support this group. Yet, those architects continue to win coveted commissions and international competitions. They are eagerly sought out by private clients, foundations, corporations, churches, and foreign governments, and are routinely invited to submit entries by the sponsors of major global architectural projects. Having built one dud, they are immediately begged to construct another. Their work is validated because they are awarded the most prestigious architectural prizes. They hold the most lucrative academic appointments and train tomorrow’s generation of architects. They are invited to lecture at other institutions, even though their talks invariably make little sense. They present a confusing jumble of disjoint ideas and irrelevant imagery expressed in the approved jargon — usually nothing more than a self-serving attempt to justify their own buildings after the fact. These lectures are then published and studied as if something meaningful was being communicated.

Clients have bought into this deception, associating deconstruction with excitement and progress rather than with viruses and nihilism. Eventually they pass on: individual sponsors die (which is why they wish to be memorialized by architectural statements); decision-makers at foundations and corporations move elsewhere; university deans become vice-presidents at other institutions; mayors are not reelected; cabinet ministers are replaced; governments change.

But architectural forms infected with the Derrida virus remain. Those who made the initial decision to build them (often against the outcry of citizens and architects with uncorrupted common sense), though responsible, cannot be held to account or even traced.

As deconstruction is fast becoming institutionalized, its containment is a political problem. Regardless of who made the decision to build a deconstructive building or hire a deconstructive architect, the highest power itself (companies; universities; foundations; cities; churches; countries) is ultimately identified with the final result. Converting an architecture school to a training ground for deconstructivists implicates the whole university. Building a National Museum as a showcase to the world implicates the entire nation. Building a church in this style anoints nihilism with the blessing of organized religion. To admit that it had all been a bad mistake makes the entity look foolish.

Institutions are understandably unwilling to lose face, because their existence relies on their ability to make wise decisions. Therefore, they might not be ready to question their original choice, and continue praising the style in order to cover themselves. By so doing, those high-level institutions promote the Derrida virus by giving it a visual form, and by condoning it, reinforce its propagation.

Appropriate Defenses.

An effective strategy for defending institutions against the Derrida virus could be formulated once its weak points are understood. A virus reduces structural order. It is the simplest form of organized matter that manages to reproduce. Below a certain complexity threshold, structures cannot really be alive. A virus lies close below this threshold and is parasitic on more complex structures. The only way to stop the Derrida virus is to fight it on its own terms, and not on the level of intellectual debate.

That is a mistake several authors have made. They have dealt what ought to have been devastating blows to deconstruction, yet it survives unscathed. The virus is unaffected, because it is neither alive nor dead. It is not complex enough to destroy by trying to take apart.

Derrida said as much, but no one paid sufficient attention: “[The virus] is something that is neither living nor non-living; the virus is not a microbe. And if you follow these two threads, that of a parasite which disrupts destination from the communicative point of view — disrupting writing, inscription, and the coding and decoding of inscription — and which on the other hand is neither alive nor dead, you have the matrix … I allude to the possible intersection between AIDS and the computer virus …” (Brunette & Wills, 1994; p. 12).

Since the virus is not alive, it cannot be killed, so it makes no sense to attack it with either ridicule or with logical criteria such as truth and consistency. Those techniques are suited to falsifying and dismantling infinitely more complex systems, which have a corresponding vulnerability. The Derrida virus is simply a piece of information encoded in human neuronal circuits and in the external physical environment. It resides in the minds of indoctrinated individuals programmed to spread it, and in buildings and texts that infect us through visual systems. The only way to stop it, therefore, is to stop its modes of informational transmission.

Deconstruction in architecture follows the methods of disintegration and incoherent reassembly of its philosophical/literary parent. Its founder, Derrida, admits that he intentionally introduced a virus into the collective subconscious. Applications of this method have generated a vast amount of deconstructed text and a number of deconstructed buildings. The deconstructivists’ exclusionary practices in architecture have almost succeeded in eliminating all traditional architecture from consideration. The technique is to brand traditional architecture “bad,” retrograde, non-innovative, fascist, an impediment to progress, etc. This proscription includes new and innovative architecture that somehow resembles traditional architecture. It is unlikely that those converted to deconstruction can be persuaded to abandon their irrational path. Sanity and rationality, however, is likely to be restored among future generations of architects.