& Deconstruction
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Poststructuralist theory crucially
problematizes the reliability or stability of
meaning, placing language in a place where it
slides between the signifier (word), signified
(concept) and referent (thing).
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Saussure was responsible for putting into
circulation the terms signifier and signified in
order to account for the –arbitraryrelationship between words and concepts.
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In Poststructuralism, language becomes text
or textuality.
The insistence on the fundamentally
unreliable, shifting nature of meaning
produces a theory of literature which
profoundly questions, the relation of
language to empirical reality.
This radical view of language is perhaps most
readily associated with deconstruction
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Roland Barthes proclaimed ‘the death of the author’ in a 1968
essay in which he questioned the traditional assumption that a
text is directly and solely traceable to a single author for
meaning and production, in short, for authority.
Poststructuralist critical practice contests the category of the
‘author’ as omniscient or the single source of power in relation
to a text.
Meaning is not fixed by or located in the author’s ‘intention’,
whatever that may be.
What poststructuralist critics question is a text’s reliance on “a
single self-determining author, in control of his meanings, who
fulfils his intentions and only his intentions” For Eagleton, textual
meaning cannot be ascribed to authorial intention because it is
“the product [] of language, which always has something slippery
about it”.
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More recent poststructuralist debates, have
modified this view of language and literature
by proposing that language be considered as
one system in relation to other systems, and
always as one articulated by a ‘speaking
subject’ located in society, with language
more accurately conceived as ‘language-inuse’ rather than a fixed structure or system.
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The preferred term has become discourse,
associated with Michel Foucault.
a view of language as being linked to
subjective, social processes as opposed to
closed or immutable states.
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means an instance of language or utterance involving the
speaker/writer-subject and reader/listener-object.
Discourse is this located in and inflected by its social and
ideological environment: “the term [discourse] denotes
language in actual use within its social and ideological
context and in institutionalized representations of the
world called discursive practices”
Theoretically, discourse may include any form of
utterance. 20th theory, notably through Michel Foucaults’s
work, has stressed the collusion (confabulación) of
discourse with power: “discourse (the articulated
categories of thought) orders a knowledge along lines that
produce subjects open to power’s control”.
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Some consequences have been,:
1. poststructuralism’s greater attention to
specific stories, to the details and local
contextualizations of concrete instances;
2. a greater emphasis on the body, the actual
insertion of the human into the texture of time
and history;
3. a greater attention to the specifics of
cultural working, to the arenas of discourse and
cultural practice;
4. a greater attention to the role of language
and textuality in our construction of reality and
identity.”
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The relationship of literature –any discourseto reality is problematic and complex.
“Literature re-presents and refracts reality”
and “language itself constitutes reality”
Language precedes the speaking/writing
subject who produces discourse (spoken
language, a short story, a poem, etc.) by
drawing on and arranging the discourses or
codes always-already available to him or her.
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The author is a modern figure, a product of
capitalist society which has attached great
importance to the person of the author.
Literature is tyrannically centred on the
author, his life, person, tastes and passions.
The explanation of a text is sought in the
person who produced it. In ethnographic
societies, the responsibility for a narrative is
never assumed by a person but by a
mediator, a relator.
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Barthes questioned the importance of the author.
The effective reading of a text depends on the
suspension of preconceived ideas about the
character of the particular author or about human
psychology in general.
It is language that speaks and not the author who
no longer determines meaning. Consequences: We
no longer talk about works but texts.
The author, the reader and the text are each
composed of a universe of quotations. The moment
the author detaches himself from an immediate
context, the reader is born and it is language which
speaks.
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The author is previous to his work; he exists
before it and creates it.
The modern scriptor is born simultaneously
with the text. To give a text an author is to
impose a limit, to give it a final signified, to
close the writing.
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The text cannot be contained in a hierarchy, not
even in a division of genres. It contains a
subversive force in respect to old classifications.
The text is plural, a tissue of woven fabric woven
with citations, references, echoes, cultural
languages, that make it anonymous, untraceable.
The text reads without its author. He is present just
as one of its characters, no longer privileged,
paternal.
The text asks from the reader a practical
collaboration, readerly aspect o a text
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The most influential approach to textual
analysis in the poststructuralist era,
deconstruction, is associated with Derrida.
Deconstruction adopts an uncompromisingly
(inflexiblemente) skeptical stance on
language and meaning through a radical
questioning of the sign, or the system of
signs known as language.
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According to Derrida, the sign lies at the core
of Western philosophy and has traditionally
engaged humans in the quest to arrive at that
centre in search of being and presence. In his
Of the Grammatologie (1967)
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Derrida terms this drive logocentrism, (from
Greek logos: ‘word’ but in philosophy also:
ultimate truth or logic) and traces its weight
and significance in Western metaphysics to
the fact that the New Testament invokes the
term as the origin of all things: ‘In the
beginning was the Word’.
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[and] underwrites the full presence of the world;
everything is the effect of this one cause”.
The Word is compared with God, since the entire
world is generated through divine utterance: ‘and
the Word was God’ (John 1.1).
The fact that God ‘speaks’ the word into being
has traditionally conferred on speech a privileged
status over writing, something Derrida calls
phonocentrism, and it is closely associated with
logocentrism.
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Manifesting an intellectual debt to Saussure,
Derrida denies the sign’s ability to achieve
full presence by arguing that the sign is itself
not unitary but split.
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which lies at the heart of his analytical method
and inquiry, and points to the dual way in which
language prevents full access to meaning.
Différance combines the two French homophones
contained in the verb différer, meaning both ‘to
differ’ and ‘to defer’ (the pun also works in
Spanish: diferir). Différance is pronounced the
same as différence, moreover, the ambiguity is
silent in speech and visible only in writing.
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At the same time, the sign also endlessly
postpones fully present meaning since
meaning is always being deferred from one
sign to another.
‘If you look up a word in a dictionary, all it
can give you is another words to explain it;
so –in theory, at least- you will then have to
look these up, and so on without end’
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nature/civilization, male/female, good/evil,
philosophy/literature, etc.
The most scrutinized of these by Derrida is the
speech/writing hierarchy, where speech,
according to the traditional Western thought,
occupies the privileged first place in the binary
and where the latter term –writing- is held to be
a polluted version or to threaten contamination
of the former with its materiality, or simply to be
lacking in ‘presence’.
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proceeds to unsettle this hierarchical arrangement by
noting that speech itself shares characteristics with
writing.
Both are signifying processes that cannot escape the
difference/deferral sequence in pursuit of meaning.
Since full meaning –full ‘presence’- is unattainable in
speech or in writing, it makes no sense to accord a
privileged status to either term or, writing is just
entitled to occupy the first slot in the hierarchy. In
other words, writing precedes speech.
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Identify a binary or ‘violent hierarchy’,
destabilize it, reverse it and, ultimately, resist
the temptation to hierarchize the (original)
second term.
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that the either/or paradigm promoted by binary
oppositions in reality masks both/and relationships, it
upholds the undecidability of the text.
A text never achieves closure, remaining instead an open
field of possibilities.
Deconstruction’s critiques. It has been accused of being
wilfully obscure, nihilistic, self-contradictory and, in its
attention to formal aspects of language and textuality,
apolitical or ahistorical.
Nevertheless, in its pursuit of difference rather than
identity, deconstruction has proven immensely suggestive
and influential with regard to more explicitly engaged
readings of texts.
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father of deconstructionism, a system of
analysis which challenges the basis of
traditional western thought.
The deconstructive approach argues that all
writing has multiple layers of meaning which
even its author might not understand and
which leave it open to an endless process of
reinterpretation
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Derrida was the embodiment of the philosopherrebel, admired for his explosive critique of the
authoritarian values latent in orthodox
approaches to literature and philosophy.
Using the term "deconstruction", he challenged
the notion that language can express ideas
without changing them and questioned the
"ruling illusion of western metaphysics"
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his way of reading texts was to highlight
blind-spots (aporias, from the Greek meaning
"the impassable"), equivocations and
contradictions within it.
Typically, he sought to show how certain
elements within the work - often marginal
elements like prefaces and footnotes subverted the conceptual distinctions and
hierarchies that its author set out to defend.
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Derrida's deconstructionism probably
exercised its greatest influence upon North
American academics, especially literary
critics.
He once admitted that deconstruction was "a
certain experience of the impossible".
Deconstruction is related to poststructuralism and postmodernism.
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deconstruction is an attempt to open a text
(literary, philosophical, or otherwise) to a range
of meanings and interpretations.
Its method is usually to take binary oppositions
within a text -rigidly defined pairs of opposites
like good/evil or male/femaleand show that they are not as clear-cut or as
stable as it first seems, that the two opposed
concepts are in fact fluid, then to use this
newfound ambiguity to show that the text's
meaning is similarly fluid.
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This fluidity stands as a legacy of traditional (that
is, Platonist) metaphysics founded on
oppositions that seek to establish a stability of
meaning through conceptual absolutes where
one term, for example 'good', is elevated to a
status that designates its opposite, in this case
'evil', to its perversion, lack, or inferior.
However, these "violent hierarchies", are
eventually silently challenged by the texts
themselves, where the meaning of a text
depends on this contradiction or antinomy.
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No 'meaning' is ever stable: rather, the only
thing that keeps the sense of unity within a
text is what Derrida called the 'metaphysics
of presence', where presence was granted the
privilege of truth.
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A “method” of “analysis”
An “act” of “reading”
A “type” of “critic”
A “way” of “writing”
What has been seen as revolutionary about
his work for both philosophy and literary
studies is the particular way he attends to
language.