English 441
Deconstruction Simplified
Amaze your friends and confound your enemies by deconstructing them.
Identify a Binary Opposition
Notice what a particular text or school of thought takes to be natural, normal, self-evident, originary, immediately
apparent, or worthy of pursuit or emulation:
Group x (whites, middle class, Americans, etc.) is "inherently virtuous"
Group x (darker skinned people, youths, etc.) is "natural and spontaneous"
Men are naturally x (rational, aggressive, desirous of women, etc.)
Women are naturally x (nurturing, connected to the earth, etc.)
"Everybody knows that" x is true
Everybody wants x, it is natural to want x, x is an inherent trait of human nature
Notice those places where a text is most insistent that there is a firm and fast distinction between two things:
Men and women, black and white, straight and gay, subject and object
x precedes y (text: interpretation, Adam: Eve, heterosexuality: homosexuality)
x is more natural than y (female: male, heterosexuality: homosexuality)
y is derivative of x or a perversion of x (Milton's Satan: Christ, "normal" sex: fetishes, criticism: fiction)
y has a parasitic relation to x (fiction: truth, criticism: fiction, interpretation: text)
x is original and y is imitative (the book: the movie, life: heaven)
y is a manifestation or effect of x (culture: economics, surface: deep structure, gender: anatomy, practice:
theory).
y is an exception or special case and x is the rule
Deconstruct the Opposition
Show how something represented as primary, complete and originary is derived, composite, and/or an effect of
something else.
Because writers always write in relation to prior writers they learn about in school, fiction is a result of criticism.
It depends on criticism, and is derived from criticism.
Our sense of Winnie the Pooh when we read books about him is shaped by our memories of the movies. The
voices we hear when we read are the movie voices, and the "original" text is partially an effect of the movie.
Because consciousness is actually "self-consciousness," (i.e. a self and a consciousness) consciousness is always
already divided, never simply present to itself.
and/or Show how something represented as completely different from something else only exists by virtue of
defining itself against that something else. In other words, show how it depends on that thing. For example:
Mulder and Scully did not so much pursue "the Truth" as uncover errors. If they ever found the whole truth, the
show would end.
Heterosexual only makes sense when opposed to homosexual. Without homosexuals, there would be no
heterosexuals.
Truth depends on error. Without the concept of error, truth does not exist.
and/or Show how something represented as normal is a special case.
"Truth" is a story that people find especially convincing.
"Normal" sexual reproduction is the result of several components that, taken alone, would be called perversions.
Thus normal sex is in fact a specialized perversion.
Whiteness is an ethnicity that disguises the fact it's an ethnicity.
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The General Way It Works
In general, as Jonathan Culler puts it, deconstruction works "within an opposition," but "upsets [its] hierarchy by
producing an exchange of properties." This disrupts not only the hierarchy, but the opposition itself.
Note how this is different than simply reversing an opposition. For example consider these reversals of a culturally
prevalent opposition:
The Pooh movies are better than the books (reverses the usual assumption that the book is better & more
original than the movie).
The Joker is cooler than Batman (reverses notion of the hero).
Women are smarter than men (reverses chauvinistic "common knowledge").
Native Americans are more heroic than cowboys (reverses the Western).
Reversal is a valuable move, but deconstruction is after bigger game, because it "deconstructs" the underlying
hierarchy. For example:
Our sense of Pooh books is derived from the movies,
Batman is a special kind of villain called a vigilante
Men's sense of their intelligence is dependent on a belief that women are bimbos
"Cowboy heroism" cannot exist without "bad Indians."
Notice how these statements cripple the underlying hierarchy by "deconstructing" the opposition that it depends on.
Deconstruction doesn't simply reverse the opposition, nor does it destroy it. Instead it demonstrates its inherent
instability. It takes it apart from within, and without putting some new, more stable opposition in its place. If you
want to really mess with something, deconstruct it.
A Note On Practicalities
In Stanley's Fish's words, we can deconstruct anything in theory, but not in everyday practice. The fact that in
principle we can deconstruct anything doesn't mean that we can deconstruct everything, all the time, and still
communicate. We can, however, deconstruct things that annoy us, point out where a text already deconstructs an
opposition, focus on oppositions authors and poets try (often with difficulty) to keep intact, and gain insight into how
our own sense of ourselves (as well as the way the culture tries to
Anecdote of a Jar
interpret us) depends on oppositions that can be deconstructed.
Some Final Observations
Deconstruction:
•
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explores (and excavates) specific tensions and instabilities
within a text (including social and cultural "texts").
Deconstruction is not something critics do to a text, but a way
of highlighting things that texts do to themselves and each
other.
questions the priority of things or concepts that are set up as
original, natural, and/or self-evident.
I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.
The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.
It took dominion everywhere.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.
•
charts how key terms, motifs, and characters are defined by
binary oppositions within a text, how the oppositions are
hierarchical (one term is prioritized and the other treated as
derivative or subordinate), and demonstrating that these
oppositions are unstable, reversible, and mutually dependent on one another. (The verb "deconstruct" most
often refers to this kind of reading, as in "Frank Miller's work deconstructs the opposition between hero and
villain by treating Batman as a specific type of villain --a vigilante.")
•
attends to how texts subvert, exceed, or even overturn their author's stated purposes.
In current literary studies, deconstructive readings are usually part of a larger interpretive strategy (feminist, new
historicist, queer theory, etc.), and often put in the service of destabilizing hierarchical oppositions (between male
and female, elite and popular culture, straight and gay, etc.).
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