Deconstruction Programme: Auckland’s Recovery Journey & “Cognitive Nihilism Hits English City”

One of these things is not like the other:

… except that the deconstruction Auckland Council has in, I hesitate, mind in the official channel of communication using the term is only one of three options for the houses damaged when the last atmospheric river disgorged on the city … tonight another is due.

Here’s some more about what ACC thinks a deconstruction process is:

How can deconstruction mean, as Trow Group puts it, “the selective disassembly of buildings and structures so materials can be recovered, repurposed, recycled, reused”?

Trow deconstruction company also says, “We always strive to, one way or another involve our community in the deconstruction journey of our projects. Whether it’s sharing those stories for them on our social media, donating a percentage of our materials to aid local community projects and even holding a Maketi (Market) for the community to come and farewell the building (If it’s a significant one)” [sic]

interlude

GROWING IN SPIRIT (Dhinamosis)


He who hopes to grow in spirit
will have to transcend obedience and respect.
He’ll hold to some laws
but he’ll mostly violate
both law and custom, and go beyond
the established, inadequate norm.
Sensual pleasures will have much to teach him.
He won’t be afraid of the destructive act:
half the house will have to come down.
This way he’ll grow virtuously into wisdom.

-- C.P. Cavafy

The Cambridge scandal of ’92:

“We use the same techniques as Aristotle and Hitler,” the consultant said. “We appeal to people on an emotional level to get them to agree on a functional level.”

The year was 1992. The consultant was Nigel Oakes, a former Monte Carlo TV producer and ad man for Saatchi & Saatchi, and he was speaking to the trade magazine Marketing. Oakes was then running the Behavioural Dynamics Institute, a “research facility for understanding group behaviour” and for harnessing the power of psychology to craft messages that change hearts and minds. But in reality, Oakes’ institute was a stalking horse for the company he would launch the year after the interview.

Strategic Communication Laboratories, the public affairs company that would later spawn Cambridge Analytica … [source]

no, not that scandal, but the Cambridge Affair:

In 1992 Jacques Derrida was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by Cambridge University.

Barry Smith, editor at The Monist wrote the following letter to The Times. It was signed by 17 others, whose names are appended.

The Times (London). Saturday, May 9, 1992

Sir, The University of Cambridge is to ballot on May 16 on whether M. Jacques Derrida should be allowed to go forward to receive an honorary degree. As philosophers and others who have taken a scholarly and professional interest in M. Derrida’s remarkable career over the years, we believe the following might throw some needed light on the public debate that has arisen over this issue.

M. Derrida describes himself as a philosopher, and his writings do indeed bear some of the marks of writings in that discipline. Their influence, however, has been to a striking degree almost entirely in fields outside philosophy – in departments of film studies, for example, or of French and English literature.

In the eyes of philosophers, and certainly among those working in leading departments of philosophy throughout the world, M. Derrida’s work does not meet accepted standards of clarity and rigour.

We submit that, if the works of a physicist (say) were similarly taken to be of merit primarily by those working in other disciplines, this would in itself be sufficient grounds for casting doubt upon the idea that the physicist in question was a suitable candidate for an honorary degree.

M. Derrida’s career had its roots in the heady days of the 1960s and his writings continue to reveal their origins in that period. Many of them seem to consist in no small part of elaborate jokes and puns (‘logical phallusies’ and the like), and M. Derrida seems to us to have come close to making a career out of what we regard as translating into the academic sphere tricks and gimmicks similar to those of the Dadaists or of the concrete poets.

Certainly he has shown considerable originality in this respect. But again, we submit, such originality does not lend credence to the idea that he is a suitable candidate for an honorary degree.

Many French philosophers see in M. Derrida only cause for silent embarrassment, his antics having contributed significantly to the widespread impression that contemporary French philosophy is little more than an object of ridicule.

M. Derrida’s voluminous writings in our view stretch the normal forms of academic scholarship beyond recognition. Above all – as every reader can very easily establish for himself (and for this purpose any page will do) – his works employ a written style that defies comprehension.

Many have been willing to give M. Derrida the benefit of the doubt, insisting that language of such depth and difficulty of interpretation must hide deep and subtle thoughts indeed.

When the effort is made to penetrate it, however, it becomes clear, to us at least, that, where coherent assertions are being made at all, these are either false or trivial.

Academic status based on what seems to us to be little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason, truth, and scholarship is not, we submit, sufficient grounds for the awarding of an honorary degree in a distinguished university.

Yours sincerely,

Barry Smith
(Editor, The Monist)

Hans Albert (University of Mannheim)
David Armstrong (Sydney)
Ruth Barcan Marcus (Yale)
Keith Campbell (Sydney)
Richard Glauser (Neuchâtel)
Rudolf Haller (Graz)
Massimo Mugnai (Florence)
Kevin Mulligan (Geneva)
Lorenzo Peña (Madrid)
Willard van Orman Quine (Harvard)
Wolfgang Röd (Innsbruck)
Karl Schuhmann (Utrecht)
Daniel Schulthess (Neuchâtel)
Peter Simons (Salzburg)
René Thom (Burs-sur-Yvette)
Dallas Willard (Los Angeles)
Jan Wolenski (Cracow)

[source]

17 May 1992 The Independent on Sunday ran the headline “Cognitive Nihilism Hits English City”

Simon Critchley recalls that Derrida simply dressed too well to be taken seriously.

He was the opposite of the image of the philosopher as this rigorous figure, who’s a bleached out, desiccated husk, who can make a thousand wonderful distinctions in the most tedious way and who looks like he died 10 years earlier. – [source]

In October 1966 deconstruction was born in Baltimore. It proceeded from contradictory elements in the structure of writing generating undecidable questions, elements endogenous to that structure which cause the claims that are built up to splinter, sheer, split and fall apart. Wherever such a structure chooses to lift itself up from the ground of truth, Deconstruction is at work, with no ill intent, already and always, to raze it. Nothing is left, least of all the ground.

It has in common with the deconstruction of the Trow Group that it is a painstaking process; but what is salvageable may be the letters, nothing more.

Yet, for all that, deconstruction is a process; and since there is nothing outside the text it is going on all the time everywhere.

Cognitive Nihilism = Auckland’s Recovery Journey

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