A Heretical Theoretical Thought

A thought upon finishing the late M. H. Abrams' eminently reasonable, humanistic (and thus multiply deconstructible) critique of deconstruction in "The Deconstructive Angel":


I wonder if deconstruction may be one of the least interesting things language does. What if it's little more than a banal, paradoxical quirk in our species' principal representational technology (language)? Perhaps the deconstructibility of linguistic forms is an inconsequential, rather meaningless 'flaw in the glass' of the linguistic window through which we represent reality, just as Zeno's Paradox is a similar flaw in the mathematical glass through which we represent space and motion. (Zeno's Paradox functions only in the mathematical representational grid, not in reality. We prove this every time we move.) Perhaps deconstruction is no grandiose portal to a utopia "beyond metaphysics," as some of its apologists have claimed. Maybe it's merely a quirk of language, a reminder (that is, a meaningful sign) that our species has developed representational strategies so efficient, so empirically 'close' to the represented real object, that these strategies tend toward transparency. We can see through them, so we need the flaws to remind us they are made of glass.