Deconstruction 1

Deconstruction
Deconstruction doesn't actually mean "demolition;" instead it means

"breaking down" or analyzing something (especially the words in a
work of fiction or nonfiction) to discover its true significance, which is
supposedly almost never exactly what the author intended.
Deconstruction involves the close reading of texts in order to

demonstrate that any given text has irreconcilably contradictory
meanings, rather than being a unified, logical whole. As J. Hillis Miller,
the preeminent American deconstructionist has explained in an essay
entitled Stevens’ Rock and Criticism as Cure (1976), “Deconstruction is
not a dismantling of the structure of a text, but a demonstration that it
has already dismantled itself. Its apparently solid ground is no rock but
thin air.”
Deconstruction was both created and has been profoundly influenced by

the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Derrida, who coined the term
deconstruction, argues that in Western culture, people tend to think and
express their thoughts in terms of binary oppositions (white / black,
masculine / feminine, cause /effect, conscious /unconscious, presence /
absence, speech writing). Derrida suggests these oppositions are
hierarchies in miniature, containing one term that Western culture views
as positive or superior and another considered negative or inferior, even
if only slightly so. Through deconstruction, Derrida aims to erase the
boundary between binary oppositions—and to do so in such a way that
the hierarchy implied by the oppositions is thrown into question.
Although its ultimate aim may be to criticize Western logic,

deconstruction arose as a response to structuralism and formalism.
Structuralists believed that all elements of human culture, including
literature, may be understood as parts of a system of signs. Derrida did
not believe that structuralists could explain the laws governing human
signification and thus provide the key to understanding the form and
meaning of everything from an African village to Greek myth to a literary
Physics Deptt. English Notes Prepared by Sana Sikandar

text. He also rejected the structuralist belief that texts have identifiable
“centres” of meaning–a belief structuralists shared with formalists.
Deconstruction is a poststructuralist theory, based largely but not

exclusively on the writings of Derrida. It is in the first instance a
philosophical theory and a theory directed towards the (re)reading of
philosophical writings. Its impact on literature, mediated in North
America largely through the influences of theorists at Yale University, is
based
1) on the fact that deconstruction sees all writing as a complex historical,

cultural process rooted in the relations of texts to each other and in the
institutions and conventions of writing, and 2) on the sophistication and
intensity of its sense that human knowledge is not as controllable or as
convincing as Western thought would have it and that language operates
in subtle and often contradictory ways, so that certainty will always
elude us.
Deconstruction in Philosophy
The oppositions challenged by deconstruction, which have been inherent in
Western philosophy since the time of the ancient Greeks, are characteristically
“binary” and “hierarchical,” involving a pair of terms in which one member of
the pair is assumed to be primary or fundamental, the other secondary or
derivative. Examples include nature and culture, speech and writing, mind and
body, presence and absence, inside and outside, literal and metaphorical,
intelligible and sensible, and form and meaning, among many others. To
“deconstruct” an opposition is to explore the tensions and contradictions
between the hierarchical ordering assumed (and sometimes explicitly
asserted) in the text and other aspects of the text’s meaning, especially those
that are indirect or implicit or that rely on figurative or performative uses
of language. Through this analysis, the opposition is shown to be a product, or
“construction,” of the text rather than something given independently of it.
For Derrida, the most telling and pervasive opposition is the one that treats
writing as secondary to or derivative of speech. According to this opposition,
speech is a more authentic form of language, because in speech the ideas and
intentions of the speaker are immediately “present” (spoken words, in this
idealized picture, directly express what the speaker “has in mind”), whereas in
writing they are more remote or “absent” from the speaker or author and thus
more liable to misunderstanding. As Derrida argues, however, spoken words
function as linguistic signs only to the extent that they can be repeated in
different contexts, in the absence of the speaker who originally utters them.
Speech qualifies as language, in other words, only to the extent that it has
characteristics traditionally assigned to writing, such as “absence,” “difference”
(from the original context of utterance), and the possibility of
misunderstanding. One indication of this fact, according to Derrida, is that
descriptions of speech in Western philosophy often rely on examples
and metaphors related to writing. In effect, these texts describe speech as a
form of writing, even in cases where writing is explicitly claimed to be
secondary to speech. As with the opposition between nature and culture,
however, the point of the deconstructive analysis is not to show that the terms
of the speech/writing opposition should be inverted—that writing is really
prior to speech—nor is it to show that there are no differences between speech
and writing. Rather, it is to displace the opposition so as to show that neither
term is primary. For Derrida, speech and writing are both forms of a more
generalized “arche-writing” (archi-écriture), which encompasses not only all of
natural language but any system of representation whatsoever.
The “privileging” of speech over writing is based on what Derrida

considers a distorted (though very pervasive) picture of meaning in
natural language, one that identifies the meanings of words with certain
ideas or intentions in the mind of the speaker or author. Derrida’s
argument against this picture is an extension of an insight by the Swiss
linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. For Saussure, the concepts we associate
with linguistic signs (their “meanings”) are only arbitrarily related to
reality, in the sense that the ways in which they divide and group the
world are not natural or necessary, reflecting objectively existing
categories, but variable (in principle) from language to language. Hence,
meanings can be adequately understood only with reference to the
specific contrasts and differences they display with other, related
meanings. For Derrida, similarly, linguistic meaning is determined by the
“play” of differences between words—a play that is “limitless,” “infinite,”
and “indefinite”—and not by an original idea or intention existing prior
to and outside language. Derrida coined the term différance, meaning
both a difference and an act of deferring, to characterize the way in
which meaning is created through the play of differences between
words. Because the meaning of a word is always a function of contrasts
with the meanings of other words, and because the meanings of those
words are in turn dependent on contrasts with the meanings of still
other words (and so on), it follows that the meaning of a word is not
something that is fully present to us; it is endlessly deferred in an
infinitely long chain of meanings, each of which contains the “traces” of
the meanings on which it depends.

Deconstruction In Literary Studies
Deconstruction’s reception was coloured by its intellectual predecessors,
most notably structuralism and New Criticism. Beginning in France in
the 1950s, the structuralist movement in anthropology analyzed various
cultural phenomena as general systems of “signs” and attempted to
develop “metalanguages” of terms and concepts in which the different
sign systems could be described. Structuralist methods were soon
applied to other areas of the social sciences and humanities, including
literary studies. Deconstruction offered a powerful critique of the
possibility of creating detached, scientific metalanguages and was thus
categorized (along with kindred efforts) as “post-structuralist.” Anglo-
American New Criticism sought to understand verbal works of art
(especially poetry) as complex constructions made up of different and
contrasting levels of literal and nonliteral meanings, and it emphasized
the role of paradox and irony in these artifacts. Deconstructive readings,
in contrast, treated works of art not as the harmonious fusion of literal
and figurative meanings but as instances of the intractable conflicts
between meanings of different types. They generally examined the
individual work not as a self-contained artifact but as a product of
relations with other texts or discourses, literary and nonliterary. Finally,
these readings placed special emphasis on the ways in which the works
themselves offered implicit critiques of the categories that critics used to
analyze them. In the United States in the 1970s and ’80s, deconstruction
played a major role in the animation and transformation of literary
studies by literary theory (often referred to simply as “theory”), which
was concerned with questions about the nature of language, the
production of meaning, and the relationship between literature and the
numerous discourses that structure human experience and its histories.

Deconstruction 1

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Deconstruction 1

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Deconstruction 1

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Deconstruction

Deconstruction doesn't actually mean "demolition;" instead it means

Deconstruction involves the close reading of texts in order to

Deconstruction was both created and has been profoundly influenced by

Although its ultimate aim may be to criticize Western logic,

Physics Deptt. English Notes Prepared by Sana Sikandar

Deconstruction is a poststructuralist theory, based largely but not

1) on the fact that deconstruction sees all writing as a complex historical,

The “privileging” of speech over writing is based on what Derrida

Physics Deptt. English Notes Prepared by Sana Sikandar

Physics Deptt. English Notes Prepared by Sana Sikandar

You might also like

Pfad - The Proxy pFad of © 2024 Garber Painting. All rights reserved.