deconstruction

deconstruction, central to post modern philosophy. totally misunderstood by everyone i know these days, since i'm not hanging out with aspiring law professors anymore.
basically it's thought to be destructive to deconstruct. but think about how we use it in other contexts. like when i first started learning to do simple scripts on the computer. my java script class showed us how to deconstruct a script to see how it was done so we could do something similar. likewise photoshop actions, flash buttons, dreamweaver extensions, so on. So to deconstruct means to analyze it carefully, to find the central features and discover the assumptions. deconstruction shows the details, from which we learn about the system. but we learn this system as outsiders.
We are not fully part of the club of programers, and maybe, like me, really don't want to become members of the club (computer programers in this case).
So in deconstructing text we do the same thing. we examine the details as outsiders. we can see the system from the vantage point of an outside and therefore see the logical links and the assumptions the system is built upon. this can reveal the flaws in the logic of the system, the influence of the prejudices and assumptions, the world view of the club members. This is why it became popular for folks who are not just outsiders to a text, but outsiders to a bigger insiders club, like say the ruling class, white males or judges on a case.
So feminists and race theorists rushed in to utilize deconstruction to show the racism, sexism etc in a law, court decision, social morays as so forth. this is when i discovered it as a way to pick things apart. but philosophers could use it to learn something about the nature of things, and that is a completed thought in philosophy. you know, just describing what is and doing it so that it fits in with everything else is a complete project. but feminists seeking social change have to say more, they have to say why that 's bad and what would be better.
I had a research project that i never completed n which i had deconstructed the body of court decisions about parenting, what fathering is, what parental relationships will be recognized when that which means parent has been split between people, such as surrogate parenting. I had this idea that ever kid should have a right to a relationship with each and every person who had a portion of a parenting role. thus a surrogate mom could not be excluded from a kids life, moreso, she couldn't duck out if she wanted to.
the problem i was having in moving forward with the article was that i could not find the bridge between the deconstruction of all those cases which show societies attitudes about parenting, and the basis that would support the legitimacy of my idea about parenting. Anyone could turn around and deconstruct my interpretation. where was the basis for construction my idea into a societal norm, court decision, law, even a seriously discussed idea?
So i was driving through he rain the other day, thinking about deconstruction a dreamweaver extension and building something for my own uses (which is much more of a reach for me that deconstructing a photoshop action). That's when it hit me that for philosophers the deconstruction was enough but for the lawyer the job was much more akin to the tinkering computer buff. When you take apart a Javascript you chose one that's does something similar to what you want, you run it, you pick through it and find the parts that can be reused and the parts that need to be changed for this situation. I once made a java script that counted down to passover. i was so proud of it. i figured out how to get the time and right the result to the page and i figured out how to make it count in hebrew dates. the days changed at sunset, not at midnight and so on.
this is what i'd need to to to present an new interpretation of an unexamined social structure like the definition of parents and the role of government in maintaining that. I take out the parts that are specific to the world view of two parents only, state as parens peatre, legal fiction in adoptions and so on, and replace each non universal part with new particulars; in fact there can be more than two parents, children have rights and the state can act to preserve relationships rather than sever them. the replaced parts are particular to our new and different times and don't have to be universal.
So the deconstruction helps to discover the parts that can be used again and the parts that are not universal and to replace these parts the law can be responsive to the particulars of a different, new group of people, the surrogate mom, the child, the dad in name only (no biological or legal tie but the relationship has been built). It's showing that the old way was to specific, but i would not have to withstand analysis that the new idea was universal and without it's own bias.
good thinking 16 years later! I'm sure someone's thought this and things have moved on cuz thought about sloppily it sounds like the original Brown decision.
did did say this was my darkside right?