The term “Deconstruction” which rose to prominence in the mid-1980s, has become a convenient label to

pin on unorthodox design approaches within a seemingly diverse range of creative disciplines. From
architecture to fashion and graphic design, asymmetric, chopped-up and fragmented forms are often the
hallmarks of designs which are categorized by the term. Yet the concept of ‘deconstruction’ is notoriously
difficult to pin down and arose from the often difficult and at times, seemingly impenetrable work of a
French philosopher and theorist, Jacques Derrida. How did deconstruction, with its origins in philosophy
and literary academia, come to have such a profound effect on the wider spheres of art and science? And
does deconstruction still have anything to offer the web designer looking for critical approaches to well
established standardised industry practices? In attempting to answer these questions, I will show that
deconstruction, if not in practise, then at least in spirit, still lives in some of the more exotic corners of the
Web.

Jaques Derrida (1930 – 2004)

In many ways, Derrida, who experienced the institutionalized anti-Semitism endemic in French colonial
Algeria as a young man 1, had a special sensitivity to the themes of identification and the marginal which
are at the core of his philosophical arguments 2. For him, most of Western philosophical thinking was
founded on a series of generalized assumptions, which accorded a bogus privileged status to particular
modes of thought and lines of enquiry. Deconstruction subjects to scrutiny many of these foundational
concepts of Western “metaphysical” thinking. Derrida defines metaphysics thus:
“The enterprise of returning “strategically”, ideally, to an origin, or to a “priority” held to be simple, intact,
normal, pure, standard, self-identical, in order, then to think in terms of derivation, complication,
deterioration, accident, etc. All metaphysicians, from Plato to Rousseau, Descartes to Husserl, have
proceeded in this way, conceiving good before evil, the positive before the negative, the pure before the
impure, the simple before the complex, the essential before the accidental, the imitated before the
imitation, etc. And this is not just one metaphysical gesture among others: It is the metaphysical exigency,
that which has been the most constant, most profound, and most potent.” 3

Such enquiries into abstract notions of essential being and truth are centred on a fundamental grounding
principle, a fixed origin, or logos, hence logocentrism: a “system of speech, consciousness, meaning,
presence, truth etc, which is itself an effect – an effect to be analysed – of a more and more powerful
historical unfolding of general writing.” 4 5

Derrida built on the work of Structuralists such as Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussaure, who identified
the tendency for humans to establish meaning by thinking in terms of hierarchical opposites in his work on
semiotics. These binary oppositions are key relationships in Structuralist analysis but Derrida takes them
further: it is in the nature of metaphysical thinking, having established an opposing hierarchy, to favour
one over the other and to accord it a positive, privileged status. Such binary opposites include:
 Life/Death
 True/False
  Being/Non-being
 Inside/Outside
 Original/Copy
 Presence/Absence
 Male/Female
 Real/Imaginary
 Speech/Writing
It is the speech/writing axis that Derrida confronts in Of Grammatology 6. Derrida argues that since Plato,
philosophers have favoured speech as a purer, more authentic, representative expression of thought than
writing: writing is derivative and inferior, a mere writing down of something that is already there. Thus
speech is fully present to thought and to the self whereas writing is absent. However, for Derrida, writing is
to be considered as more than the merely graphic or inscriptional, and is in fact the precondition of
language 7. Derrida inverts the opposition: writing is itself a memory system, a type of speech that is
capable of storing thought for future transmission. So Derrida disrupts the binary opposition: speech /
writing is no longer an either/or structure but rather an “undecidable”. 8
This appears to chime with Saussaure’s structuralist reading of linguistic meaning and signs. Here, the
binary opposition is signifier vs. signified but for a sign to function, it needs the presence of both
signifierand signified. So one cannot be favoured, even if metaphysical interpretations would favour the
signifier as ‘closer’ to pure thought. The signifer is the sonic sound of the spoken word or written letter,
and is purely arbitrary: its meaning, hence all meaning, is derived wholly from its difference to other
sounds or letters. For Derrida, this difference is the ‘undecidabilty’ that destabilizes any notion of pure
meaning, that is, it is at once, both within and absent from the signifier. 9
Deconstruction then, can be thought of as method of analytical enquiry, a procedure that seeks to uncover
and decouple established hierarchical opposites through their inversion and subsequent destabilisation.
The task is not yet complete however: the entire metaphysical edifice must be exposed and dismantled
such that it may be in some way re-inscribed.

Deconstruction cannot limit itself or proceed immediately to a neutralization: it must, by means of a double
gesture, a double science, a double writing, practice an overturning of the classical opposition and a
general displacement of the system. It is only on this condition that Deconstruction will provide itself a
means with which to intervene in the field of oppositions that it criticizes… 10
Deconstruction seeks to derail the system of established order from within, for example, by inhabiting a
text in order to subvert it. Not in order to provide definitive new interpretations, but to reveal layers of
meaning whilst at the same time leaving space for ambiguity.
Deconstruction in Architecture
Deconstruction as a critical approach rapidly spread far beyond the rarefied spheres of cultural studies
and academic philosophy, where many of his ideas were met with fierce resistance. The politically
charged university campuses of the late 1970s and early 1980s proved highly receptive to radical new
theories that sought to overturn the established order 11. Deconstruction was among the broader ‘post-
structuralist’ field of critical studies that swept through academia, but its ambiguity and its preoccupations
with language, knowledge, power, technology, media and institutions made its procedures widely
applicable 12. In any field, Derridian methods might be applied to unpack specific dominant themes:
male/female and father/mother in feminist and gender studies and so on.
In architecture, such pairings might include:

 order/disorder
 structure/chaos
 ornament/purity
 rationality/sensuality
 form/function
These were identified in an article by Swiss architect, Bernard Tschumi 13, one of the seven architects who
were featured in the 1988 landmark exhibition, “Deconstructivist Architecture” at the Museum of Modern
Art in New York (MoMA). Curator Mark Wigley wrote the following in the programme notes:
“A deconstruction architect is not one who dismantles building but who locates the inherent dilemmas
within the building. The deconstructive architect puts the pure forms of architectural tradition on the couch
and identifies the symptoms of a repressed impurity. The impurity is drawn to the surface by a
combination of gentle coaxing and violent torture. The form is interrogated”. 14

But how does Derrida’s inversions of textural structure lend itself to the construction of buildings? After all,
a building must function first and foremost as a structure: it must have integrity. The answer lies in what
another of the MoMA seven, Peter Eisenman terms, “the metaphysics of architecture” 15. By this he means
breaking the rules of the established order. The use of Derridean terminology is explicit as he states:
“The need to overcome presence, the need to supplement an architecture that will always be and look like
architecture, the need to break apart the strong bond between form and function, is what my architecture
addresses. In its displacement of the traditional role of function it does not deny that architecture must
function, but rather suggests that architecture may also function without necessarily symbolising that
function, that the presentness of architecture is irreducible to the presence of its functions or its signs.” 16

Le Parc de la Vilette
Bernard Tschumi’s 1982 design for the regeneration of a run-down corner of suburban Paris was one of
the first attempts at putting the concepts of Derridian theory into architectural practise. Tschumi labelled
his scheme, “an architecture of disjunction” 17. It supports deconstructive concepts in that it inverts
architectural assumptions about systems: points, surfaces and lines overlap and clash; the layout is
ambiguous. In part, it deconstructs the Vitruvian values of commodity, firmness and delight 18. Derrida
collaborated with Tschumi in the project and perhaps the clearest manifestation of deconstruction
concepts is in the 41 pavilions or ‘folies’ (although only 35 were eventually built). These abstract, red steel
structures were assigned a form before any function had been devised, thus applying an inversion to one
of the tenets of modernist architecture.

Parc de la Villette, pavillion

As Tschumi writes:

“Theoretical architects – as they were called – wanted to confront the binary oppositions of traditional
architecture: namely form versus function, or abstraction versus figuration. However, they also wanted to
challenge the implied hierarchies hidden in these dualities, such as, “form follows function,” and “ornament
is subservient to structure.” This repudiation of hierarchy led to a fascination with complex images that
were simultaneously “both” and “neither/nor” – images that were the overlap or the superimposition of
many other images. Superimposition became a key device.” 19

The collision of systems of lines, points and surfaces at Parc de la Villette is a means of avoiding any
formal concept of compositions, such that any expression of hierarchy is avoided. The folies form an
organising grid, an orienting device with no other meaning or purpose. Tschumi is setting in play spatial
oppositions: presence/absence, inside/outside, norm/deviation.
 Parc de la Villette, pavillion

Like Derrida, Tschumi and his contemporaries wanted to shake up the established order of things, to
break the rules, not in a nihilistic way, but in a transformative engagement with the process: a way of
reinterpreting the use of space, of “practising space” where:
“… concept and experience of space abruptly coincide, where architectural fragments collide and merge in
delight, where the culture of architecture is endlessly deconstructed and its rules transgressed. No
metaphorical paradise here, but discomfort and unbalancing of expectations. Such architecture questions
academic (and popular) assumptions, disturbs acquired taste and fond architectural memories.
Typologies, morphologies, spatial compressions, logical constructions – all dissolve. Inarticulated forms
collide in a staged and necessary conflict: repetition, discontinuity, quotes, clichés and neologism. Such
architecture is perverse because its real significance lies outside any utility or purpose and ultimately is
not even aimed at giving pleasure.”20
With Parc de La Villete, Tschumi rejects the notion of park as landscape or as an image of nature. His
space is more that of an urban grid, albeit one that occurs in green space farther than on a street map. His
superimposition of grids looks more like an exploded plan of an airport terminal. That is its aim: the park
as building – “one of the largest buildings ever constructed.”
Deconstruction in Graphic Design
As we have seen, deconstruction’s analytical framework has provided a guiding methodology for certain
practitioners within architecture. Has the same been true for graphic design? Designer Ellen Lupton’s
excellent article on deconstruction in graphic design describes how the Deconstructivist architectural
design style, showcased at the MoMA show of that title, provided a ready-made visual vocabulary for
graphic designers looking to capture the Zeitgeist.14
“By framing their exhibition around a new “ism,” Wigley and Johnson helped to canonize the elements of a
period style, marked by twisted geometries, centerless plans, and shards of glass and metal. This cluster
of stylistic features quickly emigrated from architecture to graphic design, just as the icons and colors of
neo-classical post-modernism had travelled there shortly before. 14
Subsequently, much of what became labelled as ‘deconstruction’ or ‘deconstructivist’ in graphic design
was purely stylistic in content, lacking the theoretical framework to underpin the label whose title it had
appropriated.21
Yet Derrida had already provided a blueprint for graphic designers in his radical approach to layout and
typographic communication with his 1974 book, Glas 22. In Glas, Derrida juxtaposed two texts, by
philosopher Georg Hegel and writer Jean Genet, in facing parallel columns with free-floating ‘footnotes’,
discordant typography, inconsistent layout, collapsing margins and so on. By forcing the two texts together
in this way: the bawdy prose of Genet with the ‘scientific’, emotionally detached logical reasoning of Hegel,
Derrida is asking us to look for the in-between, the uncertain, that which is neither literature or philosophy.
Derrida has “juxtaposed a coherent, seemingly self-complete literary artefact with a situation where
external forces aggressively interfere with the sacred interior of content.” 14

Jacques Derrida, Glas. 1974

He is again, calling into question a set of formal structures: “indexes and title pages, captions and
colophons, folios and footnotes, leading and line lengths, margins and marginalia, spacing and
punctuation”14 that constitute a mode of representation, destabilizing the hierarchies: inside/outside,
left/right, ordered/disordered and so on.
The pinoneering work of designers Katherine and Michael McCoy at the design department of Cranbrook
Acadamy of Art has been well documented. There, deconstruction as a theoretical approach was put into
action in order to decode the elements of design: typography, language, ideas, mage, words, values. By
setting these in play, the desired effect was to unbalance expectations with a Utopian desire to liberate the
modes of communication from purely functional or commercial imperatives. To

“…challenge the sterility of ‘Universal Design’… consciously breaking virtually all the rules of the deadly
seriousness and antiseptic discipline of objective Swiss rationalism. The emerging ideas emphasized the
construction of meaning between the audience and the graphic design piece, a visual transaction that
parallels verbal communication… New experiments explored the relationships of text and image and the
processes of reading and seeing, with texts and images meant to be read in detail, their meanings
decoded. Students began to deconstruct the dynamics of visual language and understand it as a filter that
inescapably manipulates the audience’s response. 23
These approaches intended to destabilize concepts of authorship and meaning, placing the onus on the
audience to construct its own, challenging them to “reconsider perceptions”.
Cranbrook graduate poster, 1989. Katherine McCoy: The use of binary oppositions in the text is explicit.
 Allen Hori. Typography as Discourse. 1989

By the mid 1990s, the influence of the initial design pioneers had spread far beyond the design hothouses
of the design departments like the one at Cranbrook, and the deconstruction or desconstructivist label
began to be applied to a certain design aesthetic, devoid of its theoretical context. Often aided by newly
available digital font authoring software such as Fontographer and desk-top publishing software based on
the Macintosh platform, designers were free to create new bitmap type styles and a slew of ‘home-made’,
‘grunge’ fonts and experimental layouts became the basis for a new style anti-convention and the topic of
heated debate within the wider design community and fought out in the pages of magazines such as
Emigre. Criticized as the ‘cult of the ugly’ 24 this new-wave look opened a schism later dubbed the
‘Legibility Wars’ in the design press. However, as the look began to be co-opted by the more commercial
mainstream print media, the ideological loading of the deconstruction label lightened and the meaning
became diluted, ultimately becoming a fashionable shorthand for any kind of ‘analysis’ or ‘breaking
apart’25.
Jeffery Keedy. Emigre Magazine. 1992.