Deconstruction: Steps for an Exercise

Locating the reality of the actors who participate in the activity. Detecting the needs/interests of the actors as a way to select the aspect that will be deconstructed. Deconstruction is not about incorporating and manipulating a new theory. It is about taking a specific action and establishing a permanent reflexive relationship with it.

Construction of the personal history. The protagonist of the action is the one who makes the ethical decision of whether to change or not. It's an individual activity. Therefore, he/she should recognise the way in which the deconstructed aspect or element has shaped itself in his/her personal history.

Construction of a collective map of relationships. This implies that the world is made up of our relationships with "the other" or others - of our relationship to knowledge and of our relationships with the other protagonists with whom we share a practice. It's making a map of how the social being exists in the relationships he/she constructs (individuation), making sure that the particular aspect of attention has a unity of conception and meaning for the different actors that share in the activity.

Historical context of the aspect to be worked on. The moment of meeting between the local and the universal. The protagonist should look for a way to unite the local and the universal in his/her practice. He/she discovers, through reflection or reading, the historical and present elements which compose the aspect that is being deconstructed, in its many different conceptions. Each actor, in the process of the deconstruction, reflects on his/her practice, being, and institution, contrasting these with the historical structure of the analysed practice and with the implications which change will bring. This gives him elements to consider in his decision making.

Dismantling/Unlearning. The individual needs/interests, the personal map and the context should be analyzed in light of new local and global settings, emphasising the options that are available to those that develop the practice of deconstruction explained above. We need to sort out which elements are useful in the reconstruction that needs to be done, which elements are not, which are useful in a reconstructed form, and what new elements need to be included.

Reconstruction. The moment when we take up that which we have disassembled - the collection of unlearnings accomplished by each individual - and place them in a practical context. "What are the actions for reorganising my practice that have meaning for me (taking responsibility myself for the meaning of the action)?". At this point, a practical control, capable of expressing the contradictory unity of specific actions in a selected niche, is accomplished.

Planning the transformed praxis. We seek to make the unlearning real on a practical level by providing the opportunity to create short, medium and long term agendas, in which each person identifies the transformative actions needed to make the unlearning effective. This is the opportunity to concretise in the daily lives of the actors the process which has been begun and through which many individual, group and institutional threads are going to be joined in a specific location: the practice.

Elaboration of specific projects that can be accomplished via the short term actions planned. Here it is very important to make visible the practice that you are seeking to transform, the new elements that will be introduced in order to renovate it, and the ways in which different actors will be involved in the transformation.

Organisation of the projects and actions. We ask what, how, and who is going to make this modification of reality possible by generating processes of continuity and occasionally creating the organisational structures necessary for changes to be implemented.

Follow-through. The institutional forces tied to the process guarantee deconstruction as a permanent strategy by scheduling the ways in which they are going to ensure the organisation of projects, actions, assignments, and the stages of implementation, evaluation, and planning.

Reality 2. In as much as one does not return to the same place from which he/she started, but instead evolves to a new place, which grew from the process generated by the deconstruction, he/she finds some paths of action clearly laid out for him/her by the praxis of the actors involved. Upon returning to his/her practice, the individual finds that it has already changed.

Selection of a new aspect to be deconstructed that both demonstrates and opens the path for deconstruction as a permanent strategy. This means to move always ahead, seeking to create processes, entities, individuals, and institutions transformed for the current age. In this way, a new process is begun that will eventually arrive at Reality 3, which in turn will strengthen the process of deconstruction.