No theory has caused as much turmoil the universities in recent decades as deconstruction -- on this one point, at least, its legions of champions and detractors are in agreement. Thousands of careers have been rerouted; academic departments have been consumed by feuds, scholarly associations torn in two.

Deconstruction's practitioners believe it has transformed nothing less than the way read. Harvard's Barbara Johnson, for example, compares her introduction to deconstruction to "the moment when Helen Keller first understands the connection between the signing she is being taught and meaning." Deconstruction'scritics are equally impassioned. "Deconstructionism," writes Allan Bloom in The Closing of the America Mind, "is the last, predictable, stage in the suppressing of reason and the denial of the possibility of truth in the name of philosophy."

Indeed, the tensions caused by deconstruction's march through the graduate schools have helped fuel the current debates on multiculturalism, the undergraduate "canon,"and even "political correctness." When magazine articles -- influenced or in some cases written by cultural conservatives like Bloom, Roger Kimball, and Dinesh D'Souza -- list the forces that have destroyed all that was good in American academic life, deconstruction is usually placed second, just behind "1960s radicals with tenure." Newsweek's fierce attack on political correctness is typical of the genre: "Intellectually, PC is informed by deconstructionism," the magazine stated in a December 24,1990, cover story title "Thought Police."

Are such charges valid? What dose deconstruction mean? What is its significance? Alas, Most American newspaper and magazine readers have no idea.

"Recent literary theory so rarely accorded the privilege of representing itself in nonacademic forums," complains Michael Berube, a young literature professor writing in The Village Voice, "that . . . few general readers are informed enough to sot even the grossest forms of misrepresentation and fraud." Many of his colleagues in academe share his frustration. The gulf between the press and the universities has rarely seemed so wide.

The philosopher Jacques Derrida, who fathered deconstruction in Paris in the 1960s, introduced it to an apparently stunned audience of American academics at a conference at Johns Hopkins in 1966. World quickly spread. American literature departments -- Yale's the most prominent among them -- were the first to fall under deconstruction's spell, but by the late 1970s and early 1980s philosophers, political scientists, psychologists, law professors, artists, and architects all found themselves debating often heatedly, the teaching of this difficult, enigmatic French thinker and his American followers.

The scholarly journals and academic press were full of deconstruction. (Derrida's name has been included in the title of a couple of dozen books.) But newspapers and magazines paid scant notice. Between 1973 and 1979, while four of Derrida's own books were being published in English translations and his method was roiling the campuses, the world "deconstruction" never once appeared in the Nexis selection of American magazines and newspapers.

By the late 1980s many of those involved with deconstruction could recall having read a few articles in mass-circulation publications that grappled with their work, but they were the same few articles: a feature in Newsweek in 1981, a book review in The New Republic in1983, and a profile of the "Yale School" of literary criticism in The New York Times Magazine in 1986. Seventeen, then twenty years after it first landed on these shores, The New York Republic and the Times Magazine pieces earned "Deconstruction" its first two references in the Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature (between "Deconstruction" and "Decorated eggs").

The word "deconstruction" has received considerably more recently. Indeed, it has managed to follow "existentialism" as one of the few terms to escape the terra incognita of the graduate schools and become a fairly regular visitor to the pages of newspapers and magazines. The New York Times, for example, recently referred, twice in a few days, to the "deconstruction" of the boxer Mike Tyson. But such references don't do much to increase readers' understanding.

And when the press has felt called upon to explain, more often than not it has made do with one or two sentences. In 1986, for example, when the University of California at Irvine wooed two of the leading practitioners of deconstruction, J. Hillis Miller and then Derrida himself, away from Yale, the Los Angeles Times and The Orange Country Register responded by borrowing a helpful-sounding explanation from a university press relaese -- "Deconstruction's central point is that language is circular (words refer to words)" -- and then using variations of this line in two article each.

Many recent references to deconstruction have been not only sketchy but sardonic. ("It's much easier to make fun of it than to try to understand it," notes E. J. Dionne of The Washington Post, who has been gathering material for a possible article on these matters.) For example, in a series of cleverly written opinion pieces honoring the arrival in southern California of Miller and Derrida. Bob Emmers of the Register proudly proclaimed himself a defender of "reality" and concluded -- based on his reading of coverage in the local papers -- that deconstruction smacked of "pure mumbo Jumbo" (a conclusion share, to be sure, by many academic). Jack Smith of the Los Angeles Times would write a few columns in a similar vein a few later.

Even deconstruction's practitioners would concede that the task facing journalists who want to do better is not an easy one. This is a subject that will require more than a couple of quick calls on deadline.

At its most basic, deconstruction is a type of reading -- unusually close reading -- which focuses, obsessively, on the metaphors authors use. When examined with this, those metaphors sometimes appear to contradict the arguments in which they are deployed. Plato, for example, trying to prove that speech is superior to writing, falls back on this metaphor: speech "is written . . . in the soul of the learner." Such contradictions, deconstruction's practitioners argue, reflect cracks in the underpinnings of our culture.

One way of trying to understand this is to have a go at deconstructing an element of the foundational beliefs of journalism. The first step would be a close reading of a volume of the journalistic canon, such as that seminal work in the development of our notion of objectivity, Walter Lippmann's Public Opinion, published in 1922.

Journalistic objectivity, to pursue the example, is based on a belief in facts, in some sort of hard, discernable reality (the standard Bob Emmers is so eager to salute). It seems crucial to Lippmann that "reality" -- which also goes by the names "the facts" or "the world" -- is found "outside" of us, at a safe remove from our stereotypes, opinions, and beliefs. The first chapter of Public Opinion is entitled "The World Outside and the Pictures in Our Heads," Outside is the "real environment," inside our heads the subjective "pseudo-environment." Fine. But early in that same chapter Lippmann suddenly employs the exact opposite image. "Reality," magically, is now to be found inside of us, in "the interior scene," not the "facade" we present to the world. And the location of this "reality" will shift a few more times before the book ends -- now "outside" again, now "inside," often "hidden."

And the least, such deconstructive readings demonstrate that writers are never in perfect control of their wordings, that even the formulations of a Walter Lippmann can get turned inside out. The meaning of a piece of writing, therefore, can never be completely pinned down, even by its author. Words are loose, rough devices, always subject to interpretation and reinterpretation. (This does not mean, Derrida is quick to note, that there is no meaning or that any interpretation is valid.)

But deconstruction's practitioners also have a more lofty goal. They believe their readings show that the distinctions we inevitably draw, the distinctions upon which our culture is based -- that real is superior to pseudo, for example -- are not as clear-cut as they appear. If we read carefully enough, these distinctions are thrown into question or, to use the jargon, "disturbed."

In other words, Lippmann's attempt to distinguish between "the world" and our "picture" of the world can never entirely succeed. He can't decide where to locate reality because that pure kind of objective reality, defined as completely independent of our perceptions of it, does not exist. Lippmann's "reality" is just another interpretation. And a culture -- the culture of journalism, for example -- that has been constructed upon such concepts rests on cracked stones.

Does this mean that our Western ways of reasoning are being "suppressed" in deconstruction, as well Bloom charges? Well, Derrida and friends don't meditate or intuit or guess; they rely on logic, often extremely complex logic. But they have charged themselves with trying to reason out the limits of reason -- a task with some paradoxical and disquieting implications.

Does all this have any relevance? Deconstruction, like it or not, is a product of our time, and it seems to speak to some of the more interesting social and political trends of our time. Hard distinctions -- masculine/feminine, bourgeoisie/proletariat, East/West -- seem to be crumblng around us. For better or wore, our politics, our commerce, our art seem increasingly self-conscious, increasingly concerned with interpretation rather than "reality" (which in a world dominated by television often does seem to be wearing quotes). If this is the age of the "spin doctor," those who practice deconstruction, and through their readings investigate the mechanisms of inter pretation, might be called "spin scholars."

Critics of deconstruction believe that by "disturbing" all those distinctions and insisting on the primacy of interpretation it has contributed to the devaluation of standard and the depletion of meaning. (While it just requires an oversimplification to get from deconstruction to multiculturalism, it takes an athletic leap of logic to get from there to the intolerance of intolerance attributed to political correctness.) Deconstruction's supporters instead believe its primary role has been to examine the cracks that have led to this recent slippage in "standard" and "meaning."

All this is impossible to sum up in a couple of sentences. It may not have been possible to explain, with the clarity magazine readers have come to expect, in these nine paragraphs. (Jonathan Culler's book On Deconstruction provides a good starting point for those who want more.) Derrida himself suggests that it will take many news article on the subject before a general audience begins to understand deconstruction.

The question is why those articles, difficult as they may be to report, have not been written. You don't have believe in deconstruction's merit to accept its significance. Why hasn't the press been able to contribute much more than twenty-year-late hints and gibes to the public's understanding of it?

Journalists, we are told, are better educated than ever. For their impressive new science sections they routinely penetrate laboratories and lecture halls in search of the latest on molecular biology or subatomic particle physics. Yet the no more complex theoretical goings on in humanities departments, when they are not being mocked, are usually ignored. Deconstruction is just one of the areas of contemporary thought that have been obscured by this blindspot.

Take recent developments in philosophy, for another example. The approach that has dominated the discipline in English and America for the past half century is analytic philosophy, which (inspired by the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein) tends to limits its inquiry to the workings of language and logic. This has not been the place to turn for guidance on the meaning of life.

But now a new group is gaining power: "Pluralists," who are open, at least, to the pursuit of questions of history, of culture, of meaning, of being -- the "large" questions -- and who have been reintroducing to America the work of such "continental philosophers" as Martin Heidegger and Edmund Husserl. Analytic philosophers still control the most prestigious programs. But the forces of pluralism have gained a foothold on the fringes of the discipline, infiltrated some journals, and even taken over significant slots at the major conventions. A battle is raging.

This is drama!" exclaims mathematician/philosopher Gian-Carlo Rota of MIT, and for those of us whose minds occasionally turn to those larger questions, the stakes are not small. (During a prison term in Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel was restricted by the warden to writing one letter a week, on personal topics. Havel devoted large portions of those letters to issue raised by Heidegger and Husserl.)

There ought to be room somewhere in the mass of new and features we are given each day for the occasional report from this battlefield of under standings, yet outside of the profile of some philosopher which The New York Times Magazine prints every decade or so, there has been little mention of the philosophy wars in the press.

"In general, America newspapers deal poorly with ideas," concedes Anthony Day, who has begun writing about "ideas," though not yet philosophy, for the Los Angeles Times.

Sure, journalists have their excuses. The theorists themselves are the first to admit that their work lacks, shall we say, sex appeal. "It is rare that journalists show an interest in as recondite a field as philosophy," Rota concedes. But why can't journalists approach these recondite theories by focusing on the often controversial, frequently sexy individuals who hold them?

Journalists also have a right to note that these theories often seem faddish. Analytic and pluralistic philosophy will both someday pass, just as deconstruction will pass or (according to its critics) has passed. But if we are kept in the dark about enough of these "fads" we may someday find we have missed what will come to be seen as the thought of our time.

It is true, too that the ideas in question resist compression into news stories. Richard Bernstein, whose "idea beat" at The New York Times has brought him closer to these issue than just about any other American newspapers reporter, observes: "It is very difficult to communicate an intellectual trend in a one-thousand-to twelve-hundred-word story. And a lot of the academic presentations are written in a specialized jargon not easily subject to translation to the public,"

But science, too, is difficult to explain and jargon-infested. Bernstein had been on the beat for about three years when he confronted (in print, to his credit) the question of whether the specialized vocabularies humanities theorists use, like the specialized vocabularies of the sciences, are not mere affectations but ways of speaking with added precision.

Another Richard Bernstein, a philosophy professor at the New School of Social Research in New York, takes a somewhat harsher view of journalists' failure to cover his and related fields. "It seems to me there is style of reporting that is at its heart anti-intellectual," he says. "Its basic scheme is, What are all those queer birds worried about?"

"Anti-intellectual" is probably too broad a charge. Our better journalists have undoubtedly read their Bellow and watched their Bergman. The question rather is whether they have developed a deep aversion to one very large chunk of contemporary intellectual life -- what the professors now call "theory." Those who suspect the press of such a bias found ammunition in coverage of the one event in recent years that was most successful in getting these matters into the news: the Paul de Man scandal.

When he died in 1983, at the age of sixty-four, Yale professor Paul de Man had received almost no notice and the American media. The name of this critic and theorist, the most influential American practitioner of deconstruction, had never appeared in the "Reader's Guide to Periodical Literature and The New York Times Index. His death, on December 21, 1983, commanded four short paragraphs in the Times, followed two months later by a longer article on its effect on Yale.

Four years after his death however, journalists finally had a longer and more intimate encounter with Paul de Man, or his ghost. The young de Man, it had-been discovered, had written literary articles, at least one of which was anti-Semitic, for a collaborationist newspaper in Belgium during the Nazi occupation. The New York Times got wind of the controversy -- seven weeks after it had been discussed at an academic colloquium in Alabama -- not because of its crack staff of reporters, But because a Times news clerk had spotted a two-sentence mention of "Paul de Man's early fascist writings" on page 150 of The Village Voice.

The resulting story appeared on December 1, 1987, on the front page of the second section of the Times, and many other major American newspapers and magazines quickly followed the Times's lead. The de Man scandal even made the chart of the week's top stories in The New Republic's "Zeitgeist Checklist."

Some practitioners of deconstruction, already suspicious of the press and unused to its attentions, seemed thin-skinned in their reaction to this coverage. They quibbled about the degree of de Man's culpability and, in an effort to protect what was left of their late friend's reputation, screamed about errors in the articles (such as the headline on the initial New York Times story, YALE SCHOLAR'S ARTICLES FOUND IN NAZI PAPER; it was instead a collaborationist paper). But these academics cannot be faulted for being angered by the implication, in some of these pieces, that their whole movement was somehow tainted by those events in Belgium in the early 1940s.

"The debate over the collaborationist writings has become part of a wider questioning of the politics of deconstruction," suggested Jon Wiener, a history professor at University of California at Irvine, in The Nation. However, when those "collaborationist writings" were being written, deconstruction, as Derrida noted in a response, "was at year minus twenty-five of its calendar," and Derrida himself was being expelled from school in Algeria because he was Jewish.

No publication was as free with the implication that de Man's buried past revealed something rotten at the heart of deconstruction as Newsweek. Its February 15, 1988, article on the transgressions of "the high priest of the arcane philosophy known as deconstruction" (i.e. queer bird) began by listing Humpty Dumpty ("When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less") and Henry Ford ("History is bunk") as exemplars of the spirit of deconstruction. A professor was then quoted as saying that there are "grounds for viewing the whole of deconstruction as a vast amnesty project for the politics of collaboration during World War II." Even the article's author, David Lehman, has subsequently conceded (in his book on the de Man affair) that this was "a rather spectacular charge and doubtless an exaggeration." To put it mildly. And this charge went unanswered in Newsweek.

Lehman went on to state in his Newsweek piece that "the moral implications of deconstruction were devastating all along" -- again giving supporters of deconstruction no chance to reply. An unnamed Ivy League professor then "gleefully exclaims, 'deconstruction turned out to be the thousand-year Reich that lasted 12 years.'" Newsweek's editors drove the point home with a photograph captioned "Nazi on the march."

These and the other accusative, it less pointed pieces that appeared during this sudden flurry of press attention to deconstruction could not help but have upset those scholars who had devoted their professional lives to its practice -- few of whom have evidenced sympathy for conservatism. let alone fascism. Derrida later assaulted "the ignorance, the simplism, the sensationalist flurry ful of hatred with certain American newspapers display in this case."

Charge of simplism and sensationalism are not new embarrassments for the press. The charge of hatred is more disturbing.

If a kind of intolerance does lurk behind journalistic attitudes toward these theories, part of the explanation may lie the grand tradition in America, and American journalism in particular, of mocking intellectual pretensions, especially when those pretensions are expressed in large, unfamiliar words -- and some of the terms used by Derrida, Miler, de Man, et al ("undecidability," "hermeneutical") are indeed mouthfuls.

Geoffrey Hartman, a professor of comparative literature at Yale, has referred, paraphrasing John Dewey, to the "illiberal attitude toward new ideas" inherent in the hard-headed American "frontier mentality." Philosopher Bernstein notes that there are "other presses in other traditions -- those of England, France, and Germany, for example -- where ideas are taken more seriously."

Even the "high press" in America -- The New York Review of Books, for example -- understands culture "as primarily literary/historical," Bernstein maintains. "There is almost an antipathy toward something which is more philosophical or theoretical. Yet if you consider what has been exciting in intellectual life in resent years, it would be deconstruction, the work of [French philosopher and historian Michel] Foucault, the work of [German philosopher Jurgen] Harbermas -- things that barely get discussed in the press."

That so many of the "exciting" intellectual movements of this century have been devoted to questioning notions of objectivity, truth, fact,and indisputable meaning -- notions upon which journalism's professional standards are based -- certainly does not help attract reporters to these realms.

Most contemporary journalists are not familiar enough with these theories to perceive them as profound threats. Nevertheless, some, like Bob Emmers, undoubtedly do sense something incompatible with the journalist's world view in this extended critique of the belief that there is a reality that might be verified independent of language.

The major source of journalistic intolerance for contemporary theoretical work in the humanities, however, may be just simple late-twentieth-certury, information-overload, get-to-the-point impatience -- an impatience with jargon; an impatience with the seeming impenetrability of these new takes on such familiar matters as life and art; an impatience with, as Geoffrey Hartman puts it, "critics who make the works they are writing about more difficult to understand"; an impatience with thoughts that cannot be summed up in anewspaper-length paragraph; an impatience with research whose ends, as Dionne notes, are considerably less clear than those of science.

We tend to want dismiss -- as "pure mumbo jumbo," as worry of queer ducks, as morally questionable -- that which we don't have the time or energy to understand. But if we are to begin marking some sense of late-twentieth-century thought and the conflicts it has engendered on the campuses, journalists are going to have to do a better job of resisting this temptation.

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