
How to Deconstruct Almost Anything, by a Software Engineer - lionhearted
http://www.info.ucl.ac.be/~pvr/decon.html#
======
Arun2009
Here's Chomsky on the same issue:
[http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/chomsky-on-
postmodernis...](http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/chomsky-on-
postmodernism.html)

A quote:

"It's entirely possible that I'm simply missing something, or that I just lack
the intellectual capacity to understand the profundities that have been
unearthed in the past 20 years or so by Paris intellectuals and their
followers. I'm perfectly open-minded about it, and have been for years, when
similar charges have been made -- but without any answer to my questions.
Again, they are simple and should be easy to answer, if there is an answer: if
I'm missing something, then show me what it is, in terms I can understand. Of
course, if it's all beyond my comprehension, which is possible, then I'm just
a lost cause, and will be compelled to keep to things I do seem to be able to
understand, and keep to association with the kinds of people who also seem to
be interested in them and seem to understand them (which I'm perfectly happy
to do, having no interest, now or ever, in the sectors of the intellectual
culture that engage in these things, but apparently little else).

Since no one has succeeded in showing me what I'm missing, we're left with the
second option: I'm just incapable of understanding. I'm certainly willing to
grant that it may be true, though I'm afraid I'll have to remain suspicious,
for what seem good reasons. There are lots of things I don't understand --
say, the latest debates over whether neutrinos have mass or the way that
Fermat's last theorem was (apparently) proven recently. But from 50 years in
this game, I have learned two things: (1) I can ask friends who work in these
areas to explain it to me at a level that I can understand, and they can do
so, without particular difficulty; (2) if I'm interested, I can proceed to
learn more so that I will come to understand it. Now Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard,
Kristeva, etc. --- even Foucault, whom I knew and liked, and who was somewhat
different from the rest --- write things that I also don't understand, but (1)
and (2) don't hold: no one who says they do understand can explain it to me
and I haven't a clue as to how to proceed to overcome my failures. That leaves
one of two possibilities: (a) some new advance in intellectual life has been
made, perhaps some sudden genetic mutation, which has created a form of
"theory" that is beyond quantum theory, topology, etc., in depth and
profundity; or (b) ... I won't spell it out."

~~~
michael_dorfman
_Again, they are simple and should be easy to answer, if there is an answer:
if I'm missing something, then show me what it is, in terms I can understand._

This is a patently unfair test. Without a doubt, someone with infinite
patience could take the time to explain all this to Chomsky-- but the fact
that he lacks the inclination to actually study Continental Philosophy, and
there aren't any volunteers willing to take the time to spoon-feed it to him
isn't a reflection on the subject matter.

As an analogy: imagine if Paul McCartney said that someone should explain
Perelman's proof of the Poincare Conjecture to him, and that if they couldn't,
it meant that it was bunk.

~~~
Arun2009
> if Paul McCartney said that someone should explain Perelman's proof of the
> Poincare Conjecture to him, and that if they couldn't, it meant that it was
> bunk.

Sure, it's possible that Chomsky hasn't taken the time to truly understand
Continental Philosophy or lacks the technical training to understand it even
if someone were to explain it all to him.

But it's also possible that continental philosophy is just profound nonsense
that thrives based on the following fallacy:

1\. Profound stuff (general relativity, quantum mechanics, Poincare
conjecture) is very often difficult to understand.

2\. Continental philosophy is difficult to understand.

3\. Hence, continental philosophy is profound stuff.

Frankly, applying the "looks like a duck, talks like a duck, walks like a
duck" criteria, I feel it's more likely that continental philosophy doesn't
qualify as a genuine area of human knowledge - it's all just nonsense. But it
might serve some other important purpose (e.g., a form of harmless mental
hashish that's genuinely pleasurable).

At any rate, pressure for greater clarity and simpler exposition is always
good in any field.

~~~
michael_dorfman
As someone who has actually studies Continental Philosophy, I can tell you
that it's not nonsense.

Your "looks like a duck, walks like a duck" test would just as easily apply to
nuclear physics or non-Euclidean geometry, if you are not already familiar
with the terms of art of those fields.

And the pressure for greater clarity and simpler exposition is admirable, so
far as it goes-- but (as many mathematics texts demonstrate) notation matters.
Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler-- and this latter
part is often difficult.

~~~
shadowsun7
> _And the pressure for greater clarity and simpler exposition is admirable,
> so far as it goes_

I agree with you that greater clarity is good, so long as it doesn't sacrifice
truth, or accuracy. But the context here is that Continental
Philosophy/Deconstruction/the Humanities do not seem to even consider the
pursuit of clarity to be worth its while. It seems, in fact, to value
verboseness and _unclarity_ above all else.

~~~
michael_dorfman
Sorry, but that's really not true. In fact, much of the lack of clarity (to
outsiders) comes from the desire to be concise, and not verbose. You may think
that they are being purposely obscure, but I promise you, they are trying to
be as clear as possible without sacrificing truth or accuracy, or nuance.

~~~
gryan
I don't know if anyone else is going to read down this far, but I have
something to say. The argument that outsiders need to understand the jargon is
a red herring against the ultimate point. Even if someone took the time to
learn the jargon and find some intelligent thoughts, there is also language
purposefully designed to be unintelligible in order to conceal an absence of
honest thought - this is regardless of the jargon.

I can do it with jargon you already understand, for example,

The totality of the colour blue is the sum of all of the integrals from one
meta-point to another meta-point, formed in to spherical husk that can be
opened by neither being within or without.

Even though those words are all well-established with their meaning, they are
nonsense when strung together.

~~~
michael_dorfman
_The totality of the colour blue is the sum of all of the integrals from one
meta-point to another meta-point, formed in to spherical husk that can be
opened by neither being within or without. Even though those words are all
well-established with their meaning, they are nonsense when strung together._

That's true. And if you can find me a sentence from Derrida that is similarly
nonsense, I'll tip my cap to you.

Honestly: it's not "designed to be unintelligible in order to conceal an
absence of honest thought."

~~~
decode
That seems like a fun game, though I don't have any opinions on Continental
Philosophy. I don't speak French well enough to do it in the original, so I'll
have to try in translation:

"And even if one wished to keep sonority on the side of the sensible and
contingent signifier which would be strictly speaking impossible, since formal
identities isolated within a sensible mass are already idealities that are not
purely sensible, it would have to be admitted that the immediate and
privileged unity which founds significance and the acts of language is the
articulated unity of sound and sense within the phonic."

Taken from here:
[http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/f...](http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/fr/derrida.htm)

While reading it, I was honestly asking myself if there were major
transcription errors from the original translation, because it's completely
impenetrable.

~~~
michael_dorfman
That's not a terribly felicitous translation, but it is by no means
impenetrable. Of course, we can't take that sentence in isolation-- it is the
middle sentence of a short paragraph, so you need to read a bit of context,
too.

The paragraph also presumes that you are familiar with the opposition
(familiar since Kant, at least) between the sensible and the intelligible, and
Saussure's division of the sign into a signifier (which is supposed to be
sensible) and a signified (which is the intelligible portion of the sign,
_not_ the thing referred to.)

Now, if you have that context, and understand the background, the paragraph is
perfectly understandable.

~~~
shadowsun7
Explain it to us.

------
petercooper
"ac.be" is captured as the hostname here, but that's a domain suffix (it
should be ucl.ac.be). It might be worth switching the HN suffix list to the
Mozilla's suffix list? <http://publicsuffix.org/>

------
lionhearted
I saw this here originally:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1489199>

Thought it was worth its own post - I actually gained a little more respect
for deconstruction after reading the article. Before I thought it was entirely
nonsense, now I see that it might have some validity if used in an intelligent
and honest way. Credit to dmlorenzetti for commenting with the link, very
insightful.

------
greenlblue
The lesson here is that intellectual inbreeding is a terrible and sad thing if
you're an outside observer. All fields of academic study should once in a
while be faced with outside scrutiny because without it the discipline
optimizes cleverness instead of actual intellectual content.

~~~
powrtoch
Of course, in a sense they are subject to this scrutiny. Humanities programs
are very often the first ones proposed for the chopping block whenever budget
cuts come around. At which time, I assume, they are forced to make appeals as
to why they are too important to be slashed. Obviously I don't think these
appeals involve explaining the workings of deconstruction to administrators,
but presumably they are able to say something convincing enough to stay
afloat.

In the end, it probably amounts to most people (very arguably for the better)
being unwilling to declare something as bunk just because they don't
personally understand it or see the merit.

I think the real test should be outside application. If the supposed advances
made in some particular arm of literature can only have meaning, effect and
influence within that closed literary community, then what can it really be
doing for society as a whole? Ultimately we want a discipline to offer
something to the world at large, not just to itself. You don't have to be a
scientist to see the merit in studying the human heart, you just have to know
(or just be able to conceive) someone with heart disease. And it's not just
sciences that could withstand this test. If studying music theory helps people
to write more beautiful songs, that will be apparent to many people who have
no music training whatsoever.

Point being, I think the real acid test is outside application. I won't leap
to the conclusion that deconstructionism is garbage. I just ask to be shown
that understanding it does indeed help someone to do something other than
write deconstruction papers.

~~~
dantheman
The problem for application is in what time frame is it useful? In early
biology just cataloging plants, bugs, and animals would be of little or no use
to those not in those fields as all they were doing is developing taxonomies.
The same might be said of those who started first watching the stars.

I think that Postmodernism may be a bit of a waste of time, but it's too early
for me to know. Unfortunately they wish the public fund their work.

~~~
greenlblue
Ya but at least you could ask a biologist why he was cataloging all those
things and he would be able to give you a clear answer and point to possible
uses of that catalog, same for the astronomer. Unfortunately, the same can not
be said for some of postmodernist theories.

------
MaxMorlock
It reminds me somehow of "Deconstructing My Car at the Detroit Airport" by
Howard S. Schwartz. Originally published in "Organization Studies" 1993, Vol.
14, pp. 279-281. Link to the pdf of the publisher:
<http://oss.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/14/2/279> But it also found elsewhere,
e.g.: <http://nzmera.orconhosting.net.nz/deconstr.html>

------
Loy
"Besides, there is no such way to gain admittance, or give defence to strange
and absurd doctrines, as to guard them around about with legions of obscure,
doubtful, and undefined words : wich yet make these retreats more like the
dens of robbers, or holes of foxes, than the fortresses of fair warriors"

\-- John Locke

------
muhfuhkuh
While I should just shrug it off and say "haha, you got us, we're certainly
stuffy", look at the things we often are trying to discuss in Literature.

Now, it's one thing to question the artistic merits of literature studied in
academia, such as the almost impenetrable "Finnegan's Wake". It's not all
because of its vernacular (I can't really read too much of it at a time
because it blurs into almost gibberish after awhile and I lose track of stuff
I'd just read a line prior), but because it seriously doesn't make any damned
sense sometimes, which is common when alot of it is written stream of
conscious.

But, I get the argument: literary criticism is self-perpetuating, self-
congratulatory stuff in many cases. But, just as for every solid software
developer who understands the art and science of software construction in the
tradition of Fred Brooks or Steven McConnell, there is the spaghetti coder
with terrible habits (pushing broken code to the repo, no code commenting,
etc.). The same laziness and idiosyncratic behavior is rife in litcrit as
well. For every Harold Bloom and James Wood, there's alot of hacks that toss
off their "deconstructions" rife with tautologies and dense nonsense. It's
part of any discipline to separate the good from the bad; the humanities is no
different.

~~~
cschwarm
Sorry, but that does not make sense to me.

A discipline either establishes common criteria to distinguish good stuff from
bad stuff or it doesn't. And these should not be arbitrary otherwise the
judgment remains subjective and therefore worthless.

Since you admit that "there's alot of hacks", it seems literary criticism has
no criteria or they are mostly subjective. Otherwise, you wouldn't have such a
lot of hacks, but just a few.

It obviously produces hardly anything worth knowing, no?

~~~
muhfuhkuh
Oh, there is structure. Criticism comes in the following best practice, and
you'll see this construct throughout most all litcrit (except for, you guessed
it, the page-padding hacks who talk around the topic rather than about it):

1) Establish the "text" in question as well as the "context" of the text
(certain themes, symbolism, diction, universality, etc.)

2) apply culturual congruity (whether you are applying the criticism to the
time when the text was written or to modern times),

3) Establish your point of argument and/or analysis.

4) Apply argument to the text

5) Connect the evidence of this argument.

6) Conclusion

The fact that I use Bloom as a shining example of "good" criticism should
steer you in the direction that there is quality there. His just one example
of good work.

Is there an API to access Plato's Republic's quality hooks? No, but there are
best practices. Just because you refuse to see them as common criteria doesn't
diminish the task at hand. If you refuse to accept it as legitimate, you might
as well refuse to accept there are such things as great literature and
creation beyond the programmatic kind.

~~~
Retric
I have spent a ridicules amount of time reading everything from trash to the
classics and most well respected works are terrible. I blame the form of
"Criticism” you just described because it does nothing of the sort. Then again
I might be the only person who morns all the interesting works never created
because the echo chamber effect that infects the literary world. Everyone is
to afraid say anything of substance lest they be accused of “not getting it”.

~~~
decode
"There is no great literature, there is old literature and moving literature,
but they are not the same thing."

And when most people talk about great literature, they aren't talking about
either thing. Most people mean something like Adler's Great Books criteria
when they talk about great literature:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_books>

------
bitwize
This dawned on me the other day.

Michael Dorfman is right. Deconstruction is not a single method or mechanical
process.

Deconstruction is perhaps best understood if you think of Derrida as an
elaborate troll. It is a general strategy for trolling philosophers. All the
biographies of Derrida I've read have used words like "playful" to describe
him, like he's fucking Loki or something. He says "That work of Plato you're
so fond of quoting doesn't _really_ mean what you think it means!" and comes
up with a convincing argument for why this is so. (The best trolls sound
believable, even to those with well-trained and sensitive BS detectors.) It
also explains why deconstruction can only be understood within the context of
the philosophical tradition: trolling only works if it's tailored to the
traditions and preconceptions of its audience.

The beautiful part is that philosophers who've been trolled are
surreptitiously recruited into practicing the same trolling technique
themselves.

------
michael_dorfman
Deconstruction is not a method, and does not follow a formula, and pointing
out the (numerous, outrageous) errors in this piece would take more time than
I have.

I sympathize with the author's desire to make fun of that which he doesn't
understand, but ultimately, it's a shallow game.

~~~
lionhearted
> Deconstruction is not a method, and does not follow a formula, and pointing
> out the (numerous, outrageous) errors in this piece would take more time
> than I have.

C'mon, this is Hacker News, we don't say "This is wrong, but I won't tell you
why" here. For what it's worth, I'd actually like to hear your perspective if
you take the time.

The article provided a coherent explanation of deconstruction that jives with
what my eyes see, which makes it the best thing I've seen on the topic. But if
you see holes in it, why not take the time to point them out? I'd like to
understand more since this style of academia seems to be influential in
universities these days.

~~~
michael_dorfman
OK, I'll try to do this, but honestly, I don't have the kind of time it
deserves.

Deconstruction is, roughly speaking (and believe, me, I'm speaking
schematically here) for the purposes of this discussion, the philosophy of
Jacques Derrida, and his followers. (We'll ignore, for the moment, the more
literary analysis of Paul De Man, which often go under the name of
deconstruction as well.)

Derrida makes it very clear throughout his writings that deconstruction is not
a repeatable method which can be applied to a text, but rather, an engagement
with a text on its own terms. So, there is no "formula" or set of steps that
can be applied.

Second, despite the author's reduction of deconstruction to a branch of
literary criticism, the texts in question are more often from the
philosophical corpus than from the literary tradition. While it's true that
Derrida devotes more attention to folks like Joyce, Celan and Genet than most
philosophers do, the quantity of pages he devotes to them is a tiny fragment
of the time he devotes to Heidegger, Husserl and Hegel, for instance.

Despite the author's step-by-step breakdown, deconstruction in practice
doesn't work this way. If I were forced to generalize (and I suppose I am), I
would say that deconstruction consists most often of a micrological reading
(that is to say, a very close reading of the actual words of the text, not not
just the broad concepts) which takes into account the (usually unconscious)
assumptions that the author is working within. Most often, these assumptions,
when taken to their logical conclusion lead to either a contradiction or an
aporia, and the text often reflects this, unknowingly. So, a deconstructive
reading often picks up on latent implications of the text itself.

I should point out that the author here is completely wrong when he writes
"Step 2 -- Decide what the text says. This can be whatever you want...." This
is egregiously incorrect. In fact, one of Derrida's main points is that we do
not decide at all what the text says. (As an aside, _decidability_ is actually
a term of art within deconstruction, so the author's abuse of it here is
particularly irksome. If he had say "figure out" instead of "decide" he'd have
been less wrong on several counts.)

To take a concrete (and much celebrated) example, Derrida's "Plato's Pharmacy"
is a reading of Plato's _Phaedrus._ It will make absolutely no sense to you if
you haven't already read the Phaedrus closely, and are already familiar with
the traditional interpretation of the text within philosophical circles.
Sorry, but that's the bar to entry.

Assuming that you know the Phaedrus, then: the central moment in the text
(according to the standard reading) is the condemnation of writing-- you know
the passage. In the course of this, Plato (or rather Socrates, or rather, an
Egyptian king in a legend recounted by Socrates recounted by Plato) compares
writing to a drug, using the Greek word "pharmakon". Derrida shows that this
word, like the English word "drug", has both a positive sense ("remedy") and a
negative sense ("poison"), and cannot be reduced to either singular meaning.
Furthermore, the oscillation between these two meanings cannot be fully
controlled, but only understood through context, which is never saturated
(never fully complete.) Put simply, if you call something a drug, you can't
exclude either the positive or negative meaning in the mind of the listener.
Now, at this point, Derrida then goes through the entire Platonic corpus, and
quotes every time the word "pharmakon" or one of its cognates ("pharmikia",
etc.) is mentioned, and shows the range of meanings implied by this term for
Plato, and its implications for the passage in the Phaedrus. So far, so good.
But here comes the kicker: Derrida shows that although Plato uses a variety of
related terms throughout his works, there is one cognate which is notable by
its absence: "pharmakos", meaning "scapegoat". And this ghost-reference to
scapegoating seems to fit quite well with what Plato is doing with writing.

Now, I've trivialized Derrida's argument in at least a dozen ways in writing
this-- and as I said, the above will not make any sense if you're not already
steeped in the debates within the philosophical tradition about "writing"
versus "speech", which are of little interest to anybody outside of the
philosophical tradition. But that's a taste of what deconstruction is like,
and how it operates.

I'll note in passing that there is only one "binary opposition" that Derrida
is at all interested in within his work-- "interior" vs "exterior"-- and the
"speech" vs "writing" discussion in Plato is a proxy for this.

The paper linked here make "jive with what your eyes see", because it was
written by somebody on the outside, looking in. And I'm sure that if I were to
write an outsider's view of a discipline I knew nothing about (say, astro-
physics) it might look completely plausible to another outsider, while in
reality bearing little resemblance to what actually goes on within the
discipline.

Does that help at all?

~~~
mistermann
> I should point out that the author here is completely wrong when he writes
> "Step 2 -- Decide what the text says. This can be whatever you want...."
> This is egregiously incorrect. In fact, one of Derrida's main points is that
> we do not decide at all what the text says. (As an aside, decidability is
> actually a term of art within deconstruction, so the author's abuse of it
> here is particularly irksome. If he had say "figure out" instead of "decide"
> he'd have been less wrong on several counts.)

To me at least, it sounds like perhaps what you are talking about is
legitimate, sincere deconstruction, whereas the author is talking (correctly,
in my opinion) about an "evil twin" so to speak (ie: conservatives --> neo-
conservatives).

>If he had say "figure out" instead of "decide"...

I think that statement illustrates the disconnect...."figuring out" is what
_should_ be done, but "deciding" is what is often _actually_ done. To me it
seems you are talking about the uncompromised (correctly implemented) theory,
whereas he is talking about what the theory has typically become, in actual
practice. If that makes any sense.

~~~
michael_dorfman
_To me at least, it sounds like perhaps what you are talking about is
legitimate, sincere deconstruction, whereas the author is talking (correctly,
in my opinion) about an "evil twin" so to speak (ie: conservatives -- > neo-
conservatives)._

Perhaps I am; where does this evil twin reside?

I am speaking of the work of Derrida, and the work of his followers that is
(for the sake of simplicity) published by university presses-- because that's
what I read.

If the "evil twins" are undergrad posers, well, I don't really know or care
what they're up to these days.

 _I think that statement illustrates the disconnect...."figuring out" is what
should be done, but "deciding" is what is often actually done. To me it seems
you are talking about the uncompromised (correctly implemented) theory,
whereas he is talking about what the theory has typically become, in actual
practice. If that makes any sense._

It makes sense, but it's not what I was getting at.

My point was a Nietzschean one (which Derrida concurs with).

We don't consciously _choose_ how to interpret a text.

Here's a link to an old Usenet post I wrote, which collects a few Derrida
quotations, one of which is precisely on this subject:

[http://groups.google.com/group/humanities.classics/browse_th...](http://groups.google.com/group/humanities.classics/browse_thread/thread/9eedd2d168e65073/64de1b94f7a90a4d?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=dorfman+derrida+%22it+might+be+argued%22#64de1b94f7a90a4d)

(Sorry about the crappy formating there...)

~~~
jbooth
The evil twin is the John Locke quote above. Anything that consists of
spending more time on your internal jargon, codes and scaffolding than on the
insights that they produce.

About 70% of the humanities papers I've ever attempted to read had a much
lower insight:word ratio than the newspaper. The humanities aren't
fundamentally technical in the way physics is - they're always making
subjective judgments, and everything's up for interpretation. So just say it,
then, don't give me a bunch of stupid .25 cent word padding. I have a good
vocabulary, I know those words, and I'm not impressed. If your idea can't be
distilled to a simpler formulation than most of the crazy crap I saw in my
friends' reading when I was an undergrad, you're probably not saying much of
import.

PS your excellent summary above was a case of good writing. You could have
made the same point using 4X as much words and a bunch of crazy but still-
technically-grammatical-therefore-smart sentence structures, and that would
have been the evil twin. Usually, when someone resorts to the silly-season
writing, it's a good indicator that they don't actually have a point.

~~~
wake_up_sticky
I see you're a deconstructionist yourself--you've deconstructed the penny into
fourths. ;)

------
AndrewO
Very interesting, although it seems odd to hear a software engineering
describe Gödel's incompleteness theorems as a "cheap trick used to try to
frighten mathematicians back in the thirties."

Still, I chuckled when I read it.

~~~
btilly
It wasn't exactly Gödel's incompleteness theorem that was being referred to.
It was the use of self-reference to create a statement that can be neither
true nor false.

------
hubb
i think deconstruction is more often classified as a post-structuralist
technique[1]. it has similarities to post-modernism beyond the 'post', but it
is different.

[1]barry's intro to critical theory
[http://books.google.com/books?id=SNy26bx7L5UC&printsec=f...](http://books.google.com/books?id=SNy26bx7L5UC&printsec=frontcover)

------
alsomike
I have been studying continental philosophy for a few years now, mostly Kant,
Hegel, Lacan and Heidegger. I think it's extremely interesting and rewarding
and I recommend it to anyone who doesn't feel intellectually challenged. I
read a book about Maurice Merleau-Ponty that included excerpts of his writing
in both English and French, and I thought that the French was much clearer,
even with my limited knowledge of the language, and it made me want to improve
my French and learn German so that I can better understand what they're
saying.

So foreign language is another barrier to entry that hasn't been mentioned
yet. There are English translations, but often they aren't very good. My
process for engaging with a philosopher is an iterative, multi-pass process -
I start with several introductory texts or a biography before (very slowly)
tackling a main text. At that point, I usually have a good idea about where
the argument is going, but only a thin grasp of how we got there, so I go
through the material once or twice more. This is complicated by the fact that
these ideas don't stand on their own, they are part of a tradition, and it's
not really possible to take one thinker and find out what he or she thinks,
because it's filled with references to others. It's just not possible to pick
up a main text and read it in a weekend and expect to get anything out of it -
it's more like a lifetime project, something you'd add to a "Things to
accomplish before I die" list. If "Learn French or German" is on there too,
you have a head start.

One practical benefit is that reading a difficult text is like running with
weights on. It feels like you're flying when you read something easier. And if
you're looking for critiques or refutations of postmodernism specifically,
continental philosophy is much more interesting than this link. Ironically,
it's somewhat self-refuting, since in trying to critique the postmodernists,
it unknowingly adopts an important (although distorted) postmodern point: the
role of discourse in the production of power and authority. Although, of
course, the author uses this to assert the superiority of his preferred
rationalist, technocratic regime of truth. In other words, the claim is that
postmodernism is an imposter, a bullshit pretender to the throne that
Engineering should rightfully occupy. Postmodernists, under the influence of
Derrida and Foucault, would say that this claim is "logocentric", a code word
which ultimately means patriarchal, racist, colonialist, homophobic, etc. The
demand that "postmodernism" present itself as a single well-defined and
unified idea would also be seen in this light, which is probably why no
postmodernists are here to defend themselves. To them, it's boringly obvious
that software engineering is philosophically rooted in patriarchy.

