Deconstruction has always amused me - the first time I read Derrida, I laughed (once I figured out what the heck he was saying) because I had been deconstructing my world from the time I was a little girl. For instance, my grandmother used to sing Christian children's hymns to me:
Jesus loves the little children,
all the children of the world.
Red and yellow, black and white,
they are precious in His sight...
It was not long, however, until I understood that song in her Southern-Jim-Crow context (as opposed to the way I had grown to understand it, which, eventually, became a point of contention between the two of us): of course - absolutely - Jesus loves all the little children - he just loves the little white kids more. From that time, I began analyzing everyone in terms of context (probably over-analyzing would be more accurate).
Lester Faigley seems to be a man after my own heart: we can't fully trust language once we become aware that language does not "[exist] outside of history and [can never be] innocent of politics." The problem is that history and politics also are constructions - at the very bottom of everything, every context is a construct; this is the same wall I hit with Derrida.
Understanding social construct, and having the wherewithal to deconstruct both language and context, is incredibly important when we want to look seriously at what we think we believe about ourselves and our world - but, at some point, we have to work within the construct - within the everyday social contexts, using our fallible language for purposes of practical communication - hoping, as we go, that our knowledge may help us change the context - and the language - ever-so-slightly for social good - which would, by definition, be our own construct.
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