Can deconstruction make the world a better, funnier place?

It's an all too common complaint one hears flaring up once in a while about cultural studies: That it is so caught up in esoteric theories about what the world is like that it forgets that there is a world.

While I don't have much truck with some types of anti-intellectualism masked as concern for "real problems," I do sometimes feel like cultural theory or that enterprise broadly known as "critique" can be a little bit aloof from the practical concerns of people in everyday life.

So this made me think: why don't we apply some highbrow cultural theory to some of the things that really annoy us?

Let's take tagging for example. Now I'm someone who really appreciates street art and I do think it adds a lot of colour to our cityscapes. But tagging? Most of it is pretty crappy and ugly (speaking as someone who may have once had a go at it and sucked like 99% of juvenile taggers). Personally, I don't think the pleasure of seeing one's own tag scrawled against a hundred newly painted walls outweighs the cost of everyone else having to suffer seeing it or repainting over it.

So what would happen if we throw in a dash of cultural theory at the problem of tagging?

In the past 15-20 years, the most well-known and hotly contested/pilloried approach in cultural theory would have to be deconstruction. To deconstruct, putting it simply, is to call into question a piece of text along the “fault lines” of ambiguity that are built into words and sentences, but that have been suppressed so as to make the meaning of a text appear clear and unambiguous (see here for a more comprehensive explanation). Deconstruction is thus a strategy for reminding us that the meanings of words and statements might not be as straightforward as we think.

For example, by adding scare quotes (" ") around a word when I am communicating with you, I destabilise its meaning whereas normally, you might just listen and take me at my word.



Chris enjoys going to the "movies"

So if I said: Chris went to the "movies", you'll start wondering about all the possible meanings of the word "movie" (Why the hell did he put scare quotes up around that word? Does it actually mean an orgy, or the pub, or helping out at a soup kitchen, or fighting crime in a disguise, or dead, etc?) We all know what a movie is... or do we?



While I don't recommend that you render everything you say suspect through the use of scare quotes - it would get annoying and tiring for those who have to interact with you before long - perhaps we could start to use deconstruction on those annoying tags on walls. In doing so, we begin to toy with the meaning of the word. We can do this simply by additionally spaying a question mark (?) or a little sad face :-(

So take the following tag for example. It confronts you in a sort of gritty and (masculine) in-your-face way:

Add a bit of practical deconstruction...

And voila! A badass tag suddenly looks a little unsure of itself and what it means. It might even be taken for an advertisement for a government mental health awareness program, which is a good thing.

Other fun deconstructive activities may involve adding words like "in bed" or "between my legs" at the end of advertising slogans (e.g. L'oréal- Because You're Worth It... in bed; McDonald's- I'm loving It... between my legs). Suddenly, the meaning of the slogans gets a little mixed up when you add some simple words after them.

Anyone else got good, practical deconstructive tips to make the world a better place, or at least a funnier one?