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Originally Posted by racehorse
I think that deconstruction is a term that's usually used in describing a certain way of analysing art, particuarly literature, relating to the study of meaning. Although it was technically used incorrectly in the article, if one was giving a "deconstructualist" or a "post-structualist" reading to the article then the meaning of the word "deconstructionist" is not fixed and is allowed to slide outside the limits of precise meaning, therefore confirming rob's point that the word "deconstructionist" is quite clearly not meaningless - it has meaning for rob, and it has meaning for me.
Here, then, we see that that particular word has, actually, slid underneath your tight semantic boundaries without your realising it!!
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There's a particular irony about Derrida talking about Nietzscheian
effacement whilst still retaining his notion that deconstruction was a non-practisable, non-processional (Heideggarian, by my understanding)
being.
Ok, there's two predominant understandings of deconstruction - the Derridian one whereby deconstruction is not a practise, not a process, and not something that is
done but something that
is (and thereby is only obviated by the critic).
Then there's the deconstruction understood by American Lit-crit type whereby deconstruction becomes a
total analysis, a taking-apart-and-putting-back-together. The latter is un-satisfactory to me in art because art consists in chains, not in blocks. If I analyse the (faux-) morpheme 'newreply' in the url to this reply I only get a small and, frankly, meaningless, aspect of what this thread is, what this thread is about, where it lives on the internet, where the people contributing live, what they think about, where they like to masturbate, who they like to think about while masturbating etc etc.
Cage's was never a deconstruction. He understood music, yes - his passages on his interest in various intervals as represented by various composers is a fascinating insight as to why Schoenberg took him on; his musical knowledge is sometimes questioned (you'll note, by contemporaries such as Harrison) but his project was never anything like an analytical one, his project (if, indeed, we're patronising Cage with such a high-intellectual narrative) was somewhere in the region of consolidating his modernist interests (Duchamp, Johns, Rauschenberg [sp?]) with his 'oriental' interests (Zen, Buddhism, Takemitsu etc).
Perhaps there's an argument to be made about Cage obviating underlying narratives to music (particularly around the ambit of his percussive interest, as in the 'noise' content latent to music), but this is terse and several degrees removed at best.
Bored of writing now.