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Date Posted: 13:33:01 04/17/02 Wed
Author: mark van dyk
Subject: On Deconstructivism

Mankind, in its search for meaning and understanding in the Universe,
seems to be charting a course toward the constant and ever-deepening
dissection of the world’s forms. That is, we never cease in our
attempts to tear things down, break things up, and dissect to get at the
heart of what makes things “work”, as we like to call it. We believe
that if we find out how a thing works, we succeed in capturing its
essence. We have hundreds of theories to help us along this road.
There are theories of deconstruction, theories of calculus, chaos
theories, microscopes, electron microscopes, mapping of the human DNA,
smashing of atoms, and quantum physics, which are all technologies and
theories that get at the tiniest portions of what it is to be alive---
or at least to be formed of matter and energy in this great Universe!
It has even been noted that the only real advances we have made in
computer engineering is that we have made things smaller and faster.
Mankind is turning away from the large and focusing on the small. His
world is no longer of gods in the sky, but of electrons and cells in his
skin, rams of memory, and gigabytes. At the heart of this move toward
the small is the idea that by investigating ever further we might know
the mind of god and perhaps have the answers to the greatest questions
of our existence: What is the nature of my spirit? Why do I die?
It has been posited that man orders the world and the cosmos
according to his understanding of his own inner working and the ordering
of his culture. The stars become a reflection of his societies, and the
gods that surround him are projections of his own emotions, desires, and
fears. We are all anthropocentrics at heart. When we look up at the
clouds, we see faces, animals, ice cream cones and the like. We do not
see Gizzle-frabble Wubble-Bottoms because, well, we have no knowledge of
Wubble-Bottoms outside of this particular book1. Reflexively, we might
also assume that to a certain degree we have also ordered ourselves
according to the way we see order in the Universe. Such systems of
perception are never one-way. They work in a projective/reflexive
circularity in which the lines between what is the cause and what is the
effect becomes blurred. A seaman will come to an understanding of the
sea, and in some sense will order himself according to this
understanding. He may see that life is extremely precarious, like a
ship upon the waves. He may make analogies between the flowing of water
and the passing of his own life and the essence of eternity. In the
same way, he will also order the currents and tides and the comings and
goings of squalls and storms according to his own understanding of
himself. He will say that the tides and the waves breathe and swell.
He will conjure fantastic gods (which also look quite human) to explain
why the mighty winds blow through his sails. He will refer to the sea
as a woman and her depths as a “bosom”. There is a symbiosis that takes
place between the man and the ocean. This symbiotic relationship is
inescapable when perception is at work, and it is quite pointless to
argue which comes first, for in every respect, there is no first, just
as there is no second. Both realities are called into play at once, as
soon as a man opens his eyes and begins to think in cognitive ways.
It is in this way that we can see the link between
micro-investigation and micro-management, individuation2, separatism,
and the inherent loss of the reality-nature of man. This may seem, at
first, to be a rather broad leap, but consider the following examples:
How ironic is it that in our language we describe things that no
longer “work” as break-downs? There are communication break-downs, our
cars break-down, we ourselves have nervous break-downs. Thus, we
attribute the breaking down of things to the dysfunction of a thing.
Therefore, how can we possibly hope to learn a thing’s nature by
breaking it down? How can we possibly hope to discover how a thing
functions by exploring its dysfunctional state? It is the same with
man. What do we discover when we break him down, dissect his liver, and
put his cells beneath the microscope? We discover his material make-up,
certainly, but is man not more than his cells? Does he ultimately care
how many chromosomes he has or that his genetic make up is hardly
different than that of a squid? Where is the spirit in such
investigations?
Perhaps science is not a place for philosophical discussions and
mention of the spirit, yet in this day and age, when science seems to be
taking the place of religion, I believe it to be all too relevant3.
Instead of turning to a religious book for spiritual guidance we turn to
the weather channel or the news station or the stock reports. We turn
to doctors and scientists to prolong our lives, esteeming everything
that is science and nothing that is not. We laugh at notions of magic
and miracles and instinct. We relegate our animalistic natures to the
evolutionary shelf, hoping that it will not rear its ugly head. The
earth is no longer spiritual, but a force that must be reckoned with and
fought. Yet, man, by denying religion and the power of the earth over
him, becomes so hopelessly lost that we see him wandering like a refugee
through shopping malls in hope of realigning his spirit with a power
crystal purchased at the “Pagan Clap-Trap Store”. He will grasp at
anything that he is thrown because his spirit is in shambles, too long
denied. Surely, there must be something he is missing!
The problem with the turn toward the small is that it becomes a
maze of abstractions. Whenever we divide a thing, we create
abstractions. Break a rock, and it is no longer a rock. Though we now
see what is inside of it, we have abstracted one part of the rock from
the other. The initial state of the rock is irreparably harmed and we
will never know what it looked like nor how the two pieces ultimately
fit together. The edges of the rock are compromised and pieces of it
have fallen to dust. The main problem with abstract formulas is that
they can only be described by other sets of abstract formulas, leading
us in further into the small and away from the initial essence of Being.
For example:
The number 1 represents a certain quantity. Yet, for me to make
you realize what 1 actually represents, I must go into a lengthy
dissertation using abstract language to represent my thoughts and so
define the number “one”. Already we have balled ourselves into a knot
of abstractions. Language represents thoughts which are in turn
reflections of phenomena within our universe. Mathematics represents
the quantities of these phenomena and how they might be added,
subtracted and so on. Symbolic logic has attempted to turn language
into a mathematical formula, and though in so many ways it fails to
capture the essence of it, one nevertheless sees that one set of
abstractions can be used, indeed must be used, to describe another set
of abstractions. This phenomenon creates a sort of swirling downward
into our love of the microcosm, a pattern that always leads away from
the true nature of things, their “essences” if you will. When we begin
to divide and abstract, misunderstanding abounds4 and the very thing we
set out to find, necessarily eludes us. Picture the anthropologist’s
attempts to give us an idea of a society that lived 1500 years ago. His
only clues to their existence is a shard of a pot that he found in an
otherwise barren desert. He may take the shard and determine that it
was made of certain elements and fibers and will discover many old
pottery techniques and living conditions of the people of that time, but
will he have capture their spirit?
Plato once posited that there were essentially three realities.
Little did he know the lengths to which these realities would be broken
apart by succeeding investigations! Plato’s theory was that there was
an ideal chair, that is the chair that exists in the mind of god,
perhaps, that chair that came before all other chairs. The second
reality is the chair as it is before us, sitting quietly beside the
kitchen table. The third reality is the representation of this same
chair, say in artistic paintings or words. Thus, we are confronted with
the notion that our own represenation of the chair is already an
abstraction of an abstraction!
Why, then, if it is so obvious that our investigations lead us
continually further from the actual truth of things, do we continue to
divide, separate, break-down, and deconstruct the Universe? One might
posit that it is an outgrowth of our seeming need to control our
environment. We wrongfully equate the knowledge of a thing to a certain
control over it, and we believe that knowledge is found by tearing
things to pieces. Ah, the backwardness of it! And how our
understanding flags beneath the weight of our “knowledge”! Have we not
poured millions of dollars into shark research? Yet, despite all we
know about them, we are still mystified when a man is eaten by one!
This controlling behaviour, however, is itself only a symptom of
another problem, and that is the controlling of ourselves.
Consciousness is extremely problematic. As a result of consciousness,
man perceives division. He sees himself as separate from a rock and a
rock as separate from a tree. This perception of division leads him to
see that he himself is divided, divided in the sense that there was once
a time when he could not make these distinctions and a time when he
began to make these distinctions. As soon as we became conscious, both
phenomena occurred. We immediately saw division within the Universe and
reflexively within ourselves, we saw division within ourselves and
projected it onto the Universe, just as our sailor who
projected/reflected his relationship with the sea. We cannot argue
which came first--- projection or reflection. Indeed, it would be
pointless to do so.
The consequences of consciousness and its required
reflexive/projective circularity have been startling. Like a cosmic
loop that we seem unable to escape, we continue to perceive ourselves as
stuck somewhere between the animalistic and the humane, between the
subconsious and the conscious, between the instinctual and the rational.
We divide the world into us and them, raccoons and pigeons, good an
evil. The force of consciousness has worked such a spell over us that
we cannot seem to cease our divisionary habits.
It is a comfort to rely upon the conscious mind’s ability to
interpret our perceptions. We call this knowledge and we hold it sacred
because in our madness we equate knowledge with control. Likewise, it
is comforting to us to explain the cosmos the same way we explain
ourselves for in this way we foster the illusions of control over both
the world and ourselves. Control, we will say, is preferrable to the
lack of it. Security, we will say, comes in such ways. And so we
become entangled within a game of hunting for ever smaller quantities,
ever continuing divisions, and we will not give it up until we have
split the very core of the Universe and ourselves with it. This is
dangerous behavior, indeed! Humpty Dumpty could not be put back
together again, and neither will our Universe unless we cease, once and
for all, to focus upon the division that we sense within ourselves and
the division we perceive in the Universe. Ultimately, these divisions
are mere illusions, the accidental consequences of perception and self
awareness.
However, if in our investigations of self and the cosmos we start
from the assumption that all things are One, then nothing can be
misunderstood, and having achieved total understanding, or
Enlightenment, if you will, we will naturally conclude that destructive
investigation is no longer necessary and that division only leads man
away from his spirit.

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