In our search for an alternative discourse and with deliberation we invent an alternative lexicon. The term “Nachkonstruktion" itself is used intentionally in an effort to avoid onto-epistemological presuppositions latent in conventional appreciations of methodology. The term "Nachkonstruktion" is intentionally oppositional to that modality of postmodernist thought which is engaged in an infinite textual interpretative recursion. In this sense, the term "Nachkonstruktion" is oppositional to the Heideggerian term "Destruktion," and to Jacques Derrida's term "deconstruction." Derrida's term and concept should not be conflated as "destruction" or "demolition." Rather, Derrida insists it pertains merely, but substantively, to the the disarranging of a construct. By reading philosophical texts in a "deconstructionist" manner, Derrida intends to expose the metaphysical assumptions or presuppositions that philosophers use. For Derrida, structures, i.e., texts, are to be dismantled, undone, decomposed, and desedimented. The logic of the texts, he insists, promotes its own refutation. Derrida says the text turns against itself. The desconstructionist subjects them to an internal critique which allegedly destabilizes them. Deconstructionism should not in itself be appreciated in a negative sense; for rather than destroying it is necessary to appreciate how an ensemble was constituted and to reconstruct it to this end. Nonetheless, the negative connotation is dominant. Deconstructionism is not, so Derrida argues, an analysis, because the dismantling of a text is not a regression. Nor is deconstruction a method or a set of rules and protocols. But it is most certainly is an interpretative adventure.
Deconstruction as a technique to analyze, i.e., interpret, texts to disclose internal inconsistencies that may reveal hidden assumptions can also be useful. Such hidden assumptions can preclude questioning of the foundations upon which assertions are based. Deconstruction is used to show that all claims are rhetorical and that all foundations of knowledge are arbitrary. A goal is to discover alternative interpretations of texts that recognize a diversity of meanings, and thus subvert the notion that authors can create one legitimate interpretation. Such an approach to reading texts may, it is argued, provide insights, help avoid the creation of stale academic orthodoxies, and discover clues to metatheoretical contradictions. It involves demystifying a text, tearing it apart to reveal its internal, arbitrary hierarchies, and its presuppositions. Texts are a creation of the play of signs rather than of the explication of a preexisting logic in the mind of the author. The world is seen as textual, created by the infinite overlapping, interpenetration, and interplay of discourses and texts.
Nachkonstruktion is not a variant on Derrida's deconstructionism. For rather than being the prerequisite of political action, deconstructionism appears to be disconnected from political reality and has turned into an interpretation of ideas, an exercise of language games, an facile mode of what passes for postmodernist intellectuality. Nor is a Nachkonstruktion merely a reconstruction on long-established foundations. The intent is to reach beyond recursive interpretative desconstructionism and engage in a praxis-oriented post-modernist discourse. It is in this sense that we refer to a metatheoretical Nachkonstruktion consistent with a diffident sense of being "beyond" modernity. Thus, the challenge of a Nachkonstruktion is not to contribute to the construction of a universal and absolute knowledge, but to contribute to a vision, practical for contextualizing the problems of the present and for inventing a future that is not hostaged to the past. To de-construct the ontological constructs should be merely step towards a more substantive, though nevertheless contingent knowledge. The task of clearing the ground is a necessary task and should not be seen as an obstacle to constructing a new perspective.
The meaning of our metatheoretical Nachkonstruktion relates to the philosophical impossibility of a metatheoretical Rekonstruktion that seeks to construct again on uncertain ground; for to shore up an ailing tradition, as Wittgenstein reminds us, is like trying to repair a broken spider's web with one's bare hands.
Our Nachkonstruktion is intent on introducing novel horizons of meaning and previously unthematized dimensions. It is an effort at a disclosure of the world whereby we may increase our awareness of obscure interconnections, semantically unifying or repairing our self-understanding and social practices. Here our shared pre-understanding of the world is not so much challenged and subverted as it is uncovered and articulated. What was distant or disconnected is drawn together into a common space. A novel disclosure of the world can introduce meanings, perspectives, interpretive, and evaluative vocabularies, modes of perception, and action possibilities that stand in a strikingly dissonant relation to already available meanings and legislated thought. A scrambling of our symbolically structured pre-understanding of the world; a putting into defamiliarizing relief our self-understanding and our social practices; a novel disclosure is a disturbance with the potential to derange our taken-for-granted ways of engaging and coping with the world. We are decentered. The decentering of the second order disclosure encourages not a Rekonstruktion, but a Nachkonstruktion . It is perhaps in this sense that our metatheoretical discourse creates a dissonance. Whether our articulation of a metatheoretical discourse, can challenge (and bring about change in) our beliefs, social practices, modes of appreciation, and patterns of interpretation remains unanswered.
The shortcomings of much of post-modernism indicate that what is needed in a Nachkonstruktion is not simply a new emphasis on interpretative approaches that address the process of meaning construction and its role in establishing power relations. The promise of a reemphasis on meaning construction is in integrating it with an extratextual reality. Our efforts at a metatheoretical Nachkonstruktion is an effort at rendering a political economy in the broad sense. This project is consistent with the proposition that without granting any onto-epistemological privilege to historical reality past or present we situate ourselves as critical actors in relation to what is, what could, and should be, and even to what has been. We situate ourselves as critical actors in relation to the what is, the what could be, and the what should be. We can contribute to the character of the what is so that it may be otherwise. While we cannot change the what has been, we can change how we look upon it. It is this last point which is an conscious and unconscious ingredient of/to our present thought and thinking.