DeCoNsTrUcTiOn

Deconstruction is a term in contemporary philosophy and social

sciences, denoting a process by which the texts and languages of
Western philosophy (in particular) appear to shift and complicate in
meaning when read in light of the assumptions and absences they
reveal within themselves. Jacques Derrida coined the term in the
1960s, and found that he could talk more readily about what
deconstruction was not than about what it was, most especially in
response to questions posed by others about it.

Subjects relevant to deconstruction include the philosophy of

meaning in Western thought, and the ways that meaning is
constructed by Western writers, texts, and readers and understood
by readers. Though Derrida himself denied deconstruction was a
method or school of philosophy, or indeed anything outside of
reading the text itself, the term has been used by others to describe
Derrida's particular methods of textual criticism, which involved
discovering, recognizing, and understanding the underlying—and
unspoken and implicit—assumptions, ideas, and frameworks that
form the basis for thought and belief, for example, in complicating
the ordinary division made between nature and culture. Derrida's
deconstruction was drawn mainly from the work of Heidegger and
his notion of destruktion but also from Levinas and his ideas upon
the Other.

What Deconstruction Is Not

It is easier to explain what deconstruction is not than what it is.

According to Derrida, deconstruction is not an analysis, nor a
critique, a method, an act, or an operation (Derrida, 1985, p. 3).
Further, deconstruction is not, properly speaking, a synonym for
"destruction". Rather, according to Barbara Johnson (1981), it is a
specific kind of analytical "reading":

Deconstruction is in fact much closer to the original meaning

of the word 'analysis' itself, which etymologically means "to
undo" — a virtual synonym for "to de-construct." ... If
anything is destroyed in a deconstructive reading, it is not
the text, but the claim to unequivocal domination of one
mode of signifying over another. A deconstructive reading is
a reading which analyzes the specificity of a text's critical
difference from itself.

Some detractors claim deconstruction amounts to little more than

nihilism. Its proponents deny this; It is not the abandonment of all
meaning, but attempts to demonstrate that Western thought has
not satisfied its quest for a "transcendental signifier" that will give
meaning to all other signs. According to Derrida, "Deconstruction

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is not an enclosure in nothingness, but an openness to the
other"

Logocentrism and the Critique of Binary

Oppositions
Logocentrism is a neologism coined by Jacques Derrida, which
refers to the perceived tendency of Western thought to locate the
center of any text or discourse within the logos.

Deconstruction's central concern is a radical critique of the

Enlightenment project and of metaphysics, including in particular
the founding texts by such philosophers as Plato, Rousseau, and
Husserl, but also other sorts of texts, including literature.
Deconstruction identifies in the Western philosophical tradition a
"logocentrism" or "metaphysics of presence" (sometimes known as
phallogocentrism) which holds that speech-thought (the logos) is a
privileged, ideal, and self-present entity, through which all discourse
and meaning are derived. This logocentrism is the primary target of
deconstruction.

One typical form of deconstructive reading is the critique of binary

oppositions, or the criticism of dichotomous thought. A central
deconstructive argument holds that, in all the classic dualities of
Western thought, one term is privileged or "central" over the other.
The privileged, central term is the one most associated with the
phallus and the logos. Examples include:

• speech over writing

• presence over absence
• identity over difference
• fullness over emptiness
• meaning over meaninglessness
• mastery over submission
• life over death

Derrida argues in Of Grammatology (translated by Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak and published in English in 1976) that, in each
such case, the first term is classically conceived as original,
authentic, and superior, while the second is thought of as
secondary, derivative, or even "parasitic." These binary oppositions,
or "violent hierarchies", and others of their form, he argues, must be
deconstructed.

Text and Deconstruction

According to deconstructive readers, one of the phallogocentrisms

of modernism is the distinction between speech (logos) and writing,
with writing historically being thought of as derivative to logos. As

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part of subverting the presumed dominance of logos over text,
Derrida argued that the idea of a speech-writing dichotomy contains
within it the idea of a very expansive view of textuality that
subsumes both speech and writing. According to Jacques Derrida,
"There is nothing outside of the text" (Derrida, 1976, at 158). That
is, text is thought of not merely as linear writing derived from
speech, but any form of depiction, marking, or storage, including
the marking of the human brain by the process of cognition or by
the senses.

In a sense, deconstruction is simply a way to read text (as broadly

defined); any deconstruction has a text as its object and subject.
This accounts for deconstruction's broad cross-disciplinary scope.
Deconstruction has been applied to literature, art, architecture,
science, mathematics, philosophy, and psychology, and any other
disciplines that can be thought of as involving the act of marking.

In deconstruction, text can be thought of as "dead", in the sense

that once the markings are made, the markings remain in
suspended animation and do not change in themselves. Thus, what
an author says about his text doesn't revive it, and is just another
text commenting on the original, along with the commentary of
others. In this view, when an author says, "You have understood my
work perfectly," this utterance constitutes an addition to the textual
system, along with what the reader said was understood in and
about the original text, and not a resuscitation of the original dead
text. The reader has an opinion, the author has an opinion.
Communication is possible not because the text has a
transcendental signification, but because the brain tissue of the
author contains similar "markings" as the brain tissue of the reader.
These brain markings, however, are unstable and fragmentary.

The Post-structuralist Theory

Post-structural practices generally operate on some basic

assumptions:

• Post-structuralists hold that the concept of "self" as a

singular and coherent entity is a fictional construct. Instead,
an individual comprises conflicting tensions and knowledge
claims (e.g. gender, class, profession, etc.). Therefore, to
properly study a text a reader must understand how the work
is related to her own personal concept of self. This self-
perception plays a critical role in one's interpretation of
meaning. While different thinkers' views on the self (or the
subject) vary, it is often said to be constituted by discourse(s).
Lacan's account includes a psychoanalytic dimension, while
Foucault stresses the effects of power on the self.

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 • The meaning the author intended is secondary to the
meaning that the reader perceives. Post-structuralism rejects
the idea of a literary text having a single purpose, a single
meaning or one singular existence. Instead, every individual
reader creates a new and individual purpose, meaning, and
existence for a given text. To step outside of literary theory,
this position is generalizable to any situation where a subject
perceives a sign. Meaning (or the signified, in Saussure's
scheme, which is heavily presumed upon in post-structuralism
as in structualism) is constructed by an individual from a
signifier. This is why the signified is said to 'slide' under the
signifier, and explains the talk about the 'primacy of the
signifier'.

• A post-structuralist critic must be able to utilize a variety

of perspectives to create a multifaceted interpretation of a
text, even if these interpretations conflict with one another. It
is particularly important to analyze how the meanings of a
text shift in relation to certain variables, usually involving the
identity of the reader.

Destabilized Meaning

In the post-structuralist approach to textual analysis, the reader

replaces the author as the primary subject of inquiry. This
displacement is often referred to as the "destabilizing" or
"decentering" of the author, though it has its greatest effect on the
text itself. Without a central fixation on the author, post-
structuralists examine other sources for meaning (e.g., readers,
cultural norms, other literature, etc.). These alternative sources are
never authoritative, and promise no consistency.

In his essay "Signification and Sense", Emmanuel Lévinas remarked

on this new field of semantic inquiry:

...language refers to the position of the listener and the speaker,

that is, to the contingency of their story. To seize by inventory all
the contexts of language and all possible positions of interlocutors is
a senseless task. Every verbal signification lies at the confluence of
countless semantic rivers. Experience, like language, no longer
seems to be made of isolated elements lodged somehow in a
Euclidean space... [Words] signify from the "world" and from the
position of one who is looking.

– Lévinas, Signification and Sense, Humanism of the Other, tr. Nidra

Poller

Deconstruction

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A major theory associated with Structuralism was binary opposition.
This theory proposed that there are certain theoretical and
conceptual opposites, often arranged in a hierarchy, which structure
a given text. Such binary pairs could include male/female,
speech/writing, rational/emotional.

Post-structuralism rejects the notion of the essential quality of the

dominant relation in the hierarchy, choosing rather to expose these
relations and the dependancy of the dominant term on its
apparently subservient counterpart. The only way to properly
understand these meanings is to deconstruct the assumptions and
knowledge systems which produce the illusion of singular meaning.

A good example of this is a close reading of the Dylan Thomas

poem, "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London",
that incorporates the line "After the first death there is no other." A
deconstructionist will view this as widely open: Since there is a "first
death," there is the implication that there will be another, yet
Thomas contradicts himself in the line by saying "there is no other".
Deconstructionists assert that this shows "discontinuity" in the line.
This discontinuity points out that the language has a "slipperiness"
which makes precise interpretation impossible. Meaning, therefore,
is equally in the hands of the reader and the author.