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DECONSTRUCTION
STRUCTURALISM AND POSTSTRUCTURALISM: TWO VIEWS OF THE WORLD
The application of structuralist
principles varies from one theoretician to another, but all believe that
language is the primary means of significations (how we achieve meaning) and
the language comprises its own rule-governed system to achieve such meaning.
Wanting to discover these rules, sturcturalist declare that the proper study of
reality and meaning is the system behind such individual practices, not the
individual practices themselves. For the structuralist, the proper study of
literature is an inquiry into the conditions surrounding the act of
interpretation itself, not an investigating of the individual texts. Holding to
principles of Ferdinand de saussure, the founding father of structuralism,
structuralists seek to discover the overall system (langue) that accounts for
an individual interpretation (parole) of a text. Meaning and the reasons for
meaning can be both ascertained and discovered.
Deconstruction
theory and practice in the late 1960s. Deconstruction asks a new set of
question, endeavoring to show that what a text claims it says and what it
actually says are discernibly different, rather than providing answers about
the meaning of texts or a methodology for discovering how a text means.
MODERNISM
For many historians and literary theorist, the Enlightment
or the Age of Reason (eighteenth century) is synonymous with modernism.
Modernism rests on the foundations laid by Renè Descartes (1959-1650), a French
philosopher, scientist, and mathematician. Ultimately, declares Descartes, the
only thing one cannot doubt is one’s own existence. Certainly and knowledge
begin with the self.
Francais Bacon (1561 – 1626), the scientist method has
become part of everyone’s elementary and high school education. It is through
experimentation, in the doing of experiments, in making inductive
generalizations, and in verifying the results that one can discover truths
about the physical world. Sir Isaac Newton (1642 – 1727) the physical world is
no longer a mystery but a mechanism that operates according to a system of laws
that can be understood by any thinking, rational human being who is wiling to
apply the principle of the scientific method to the physical universe.
Benjamin Franklin (1700 – 90) is the archetypal modern
philosophy/scientist. Self–assured, Franklin declares that he literally pulled
himself up by his own bootstraps, overcoming poverty and ignorance through
education to become America’s first internationally known and respected scientist
/ philosopher / statesman.
Like Descartes, Franklin does not abandon religion and
replace it with science. Holding to the tenets of Deism, he rejects miracles,
myths, and much of what he called religious superstitions. For Franklin and
other enlightened minds, truth is to be discovered scientifically, not through
unruly and passionate imagination or through one’s feeling and intuition.
In particular, writers and literary theoreticians-New
Critics, structuralists, and others-believed that texts had some kind of
objective existence and therefore could be studied and analyzed with appropriate
conclusions to follow from such analyses.
POSTSTRUCTURALISM OR POSTMODERNISM
Until the late in 1960s (with a few notable exceptions), the
worldview espoused by modernity and symbolized by Benjamin Franklin provided
acceptable and workable answers to these questions. Jacques Derrida
poststructural view of the world in the mid-1960’s finds deconstruction. For Derirda
and other postmodernist, no such thing as objective reality exists. Because
these poststructuralists, thinkers assert that many truths exist, not one, they
declare that modernity’s concept of one objective reality must be disavowed and
replaced by many different concepts, each being a valid and reliable
interpretation and construction of reality.
Postmodernism
popped onto the American literary scene with the coming of Derrida to American
in 1966 would be inaccurate. Beginning in 1960s and continuing in the present, the voices of French philosopher
Jacques Derrida, French cultural historian Michel Foucault, aesthetician
Jean-Francois Lyotard, and ardent American pragmatist Richard Rorty, professor
of humanities at the university of Virginia, all declare univocally the death
of objective truth. When such principles are applied to literary interpretation,
the postmodernist realizes that no such thing as “the” meaning or correct
meaning of an aesthetic text exists.
HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT
Beginnings of Deconstruction
Jacques Derrida, deconstruction first emerged on the
American literary stage in 1966. Derrida himself, however, would not want
deconstruction dubbed a critical theory, a school of criticism, a mode or
method of literary criticism, or a philosophy. Unlike a unified treatise,
Derrida claims, his approach to reading (and literary analysis) is more a
strategic device than a methodology, more a strategy or approach to literature
than a school or theory of criticism. Such theories of criticism, he believes,
must identify with a body of knowledge that they claim to be true or to contain
truth. It is this assertion (that truth or a core of metaphysical ideals
actually exist and can be believed, articulated, and supported) that Derrida
and deconstruction wish to dispute and “deconstruct”.
Deconstruction uses previously formulated theories from
other school of criticism, coins many words for its newly established ideas,
and challenges beliefs long held by western culture, many students, teachers
and even critics avoid studying it, fearing its supposed complexity. By
organizing deconstruction and its assumptions into three workable areas of
study rather than plunging directly into some of its complex terminology, we
can begin to grasp this approach to textual analysis. In order to understand
deconstruction and its strategic approach to a text, then, we must first gain a
working knowledge of the historical and philosophical roots of structuralism, a
linguistic approach to textual analysis that gained critical attention and
popularity in the 1950s and 1960s.
After examining structuralism, we must investigate the
proposed radical changes Derrida makes in western philosophy and metaphysic.
Finally, we must master a set of new terminology coupled with new philosophical
assumptions and their corresponding methodological approaches to textual
analysis if we wish to understand and use deconstruction’s approach to
interpreting a text.
Structuralism at a glance
Saussure, the
father of modern linguistic, dramatically shifted the focus of linguistic
science in the early twentieth century. It is his concerning language that from
the core of structuralism, the critical body of literary theory from which
Derrida borrow many f the major philosophical building blocks of
deconstruction.
Believing that our
knowledge of the world is shaped by the language that represents it, Saussure
insists on the arbitrary relationship between the signifier and the signified.
By so doing, he undermines the long held belief that there is some natural
links between the word and the thing it represents. For Saussure, meaning in
languages resides in a systematized combination of sounds that rely chiefly on
the differences among these signs, not any innate properties within the signs
themselves. It is this concept that meaning in language is determined by the
determined by the differences among the language signs that Derrida borrows
from Saussure as a key building blocks in the formulation of deconstruction.
Derrida’s Interpretation of Saussure’s Sign
Derridean deconstruction begins with and emphatically affirms
Saussure’s decree that language is a system based on differences. Derrida
agrees with Sausuure that we can know the meaning of signifiers through and
because of their relationships and their differences among themselves. But,
unlike Saussure, Derrida also applies this reasoning to the signified. Like the
signifier, the signified (or concept) can also be known only through its
relationships and its differences among other signifieds.
ASSUMPTIONS
Transcendental
Signified
He boldly asserts
that the entire history of western metaphysic from Plato to the present is
founded upon a classic, fundamental error: the searching for a transcendental
signified, an external point of reference on which one may build a concept or
philosophy. Unlike other signifieds, the transcendental signified would have to
be understood without being compared to other signifieds or signifiers. In
other words, its meaning would originate directly with itself, not
differentially or relationally as does the meaning of all other signifieds or
signifiers.
Logocentrism
According to
Derrida, western metaphysics has invented a variety of terms hat function as
centers: God, reason, origin, being, essence, truth, humanity, beginning,
end, and self, to name a few. This Western proclivity for desiring a
center Derrida names logocentrism: the belief that there is an ultimate
reality or center of truth that can serve as the basis for all our thoughts and
actions.
Such logocentric
thinking, declares Derrida, has its origin Aristotle’s principle of
noncontradiction: A thing cannot both have a property and not have a property.
Thanks to Aristotle, maintains Derrida, Western metaphysic has developed an
either-or mentality or logic that inevitably leads to dualistic thinking and to
the centering and decentering of transcendental signifieds.
Binary
Oppositions
Derrida concludes that Western metaphysic is
based on a system of binary opposition or conceptual oppositions. For
each center there exists an opposing center (God/humankind, for example). In
addition Western philosophy holds that in each of these binary operations or
two opposing centers, one concept is superior and defines itself by its
opposite or inferior center.
Phonocentrism
In the binary opposition on which western metaphysics
has built itself from the time of Plato, Derrida declares that one element will
always be in superior position, or privileged, whereas the other becomes
inferior, or unprivileged. Most importantly, Derrida decrees that
Western thought has long privileged speech over writing. This privileging of
speech over writing Derrida calls Phonocentrism.
Because Phonocentrism is based on the assumption that
speech conveys the meaning or direct ideas of a speaker better than writing ( a
mere copy of speech), phonocentrism assumes a logocentric way of thinking, that
the self is the centre of meaning and can be ascertain ideas directly from
other selves through spoken words. Through speaking, the self declares its
presence, its significance, and its being (for existence).
Metaphysics of Presence
Accordingly, Derrida coins the phrase Metaphysics of
Presence to encompass ideas such as logocentrism, phonocentrism, the
operations of binary opposition, and other notions that Western thought holds
concerning language and metaphysics. By deconstructing the basic premises of
Metaphysics of Presence, Derrida believes he gives us a strategy for reading
that opens up a variety of new interpretations heretofore unseen by those who
are bound by the restrains of Western thought.
METHODOLOGY
Acknowledging Binary Operations in Western Thought
The first stage in
deconstructive reading is to recognize the existence and operation of binary
opposition in our thinking.
Once the speech /
writing hierarchy or any other hierarchy is recognized and acknowledged,
Derrida asserts, we can readily reverse its elements. By reversing the
hierarchy, Derrida does not wish merely to substitute one hierarchy for another
and to involve himself in a negative mood. We can examine the values and
beliefs that give rise to both the original hierarchy and the newly created
one. Such an examination reveals how to meanings of terms arise from the
differences between them.
Arche-writing
In of Grammatology, Derrida spends much time
explaining why the speech / writing hierarchy can and must be reserved.
According to Derrida’s metaphysical reasoning, language is a special kind of
writing which he calls archi-ècriture or arche-writing.
For Derrida both writing and language are means of
signification, and each can be considered a signifying system. Traditional
western metaphysics and Sussurean linguistic equate speech (language) with
presence, for speech is accompanied y the presence of a living speaker.
But Derrida asserts that we must broaden our
understanding f writing. Writing, he declares, cannot be reduced to letters or
other symbols inscribed on a page. Without language (or arche-writing), argues
Derrida, there can be no consciousness, for consciousness progression language.
Through arche-writing, we impose human consciousness on the world.
Supplementation
The relationship between any binary hierarchy, however,
is always unstable and problematic. Derrida use the term supplement to
refer to the unstable relationship between elements in a binary opposition.
Difference
Derrida begins to develop his reading strategy of
deconstruction. Once he turns Western metaphysics on its head, he asserts his
answer to logocentrism and other Western elements by coining a new word and
concept: diffèrance. The word id derived from the French word diffèrer,
meaning both to defer, postpone, or delay, and to differ, to be
different from.
Understanding what Derrida means by differance is
one of the basic keys to understanding deconstruction.
Deconstructive Suppositions for Textual Analysis
When beginning the interpretative process, deconstructors
seek to override their own logocentric and inherited ways of viewing a text. By
identifying the binary operations that exist in the text, deconstructors can
then show the preconceived assumptions on which most of us base our
interpretations.
According to
decnstructors, we cannot simultaneously both see both perspectives in the
story. To discover where the new hierarchy Satan/God or Evil/ good will lead us
in our interpretations we must suspend our first interpretation. We do not,
however, forget it, for it is locked in our minds. We simply shift our
allegiance to another perspective or level.
By asking what will
happen if we reverse the hierarchies that frame our preconceived ways of
thinking, we open ourselves to a never-ending process of interpretation that
holds that no hierarchy or binary operation is right and no other is wrong.
Deconstruction:
A New Reading Strategy
Deconstructors do
not wish, then, to set up a new philosophy, a new literary theory of analysis,
or a new school of literary criticism. Decondtructors therefore look for places
in the texts where the author misspeaks or loses control of language and says
what was supposedly not meant to be said. By examining such slips and the
binary operations that govern them, deconstructors are able to demonstrate the undecidability
of a text’s meaning.
At first glance, a
deconstructionist reading strategy appear to be linear – that is, having a
clearly delineated beginning, middle, and end. If this is so, then to apply
this strategy to a text, we must do the following:
·
Discover the binary operations
that govern a text.
·
Comment on the values,
concepts, and ideas beyond these operations.
·
Reverse these present binary
operations.
·
Dismantle previously held
worldviews.
·
Accept the possibility of
various perspectives or levels of meaning in text based on the new binary
inversions.
·
Allow meaning of the text to be
undecidable.
Overall, deconstruction desires an ongoing relationship
between the interpreter (the
critic) and the text. By examining the text alone, deconstructors
hope to ask a set of questions that continually challenges the ideological
positions of power and authority that dominate literary criticism.
AMERICAN DECONSTRUCTORS
After Derrida’s
introduction of deconstruction to his American audiences in 1966, Derrida found
several sympathetic listeners who soon became loyal adherents and defenders of
his new reading strategy: Romantic scholar Paul de Man (Blindness and
Insight, 1971), rhetorical deconstructor Hayden White (Topics of
Discourse, 1978) the sometimes terse metaphysical deconstructor Geoffrey
Hartman (Criticism in The Wilderness, 1980), the strong voices of
Barbara Johnson (The Critical Differences, 1980), and phenomenological
critic turned deconstructor J. Hillis Miller ( Fiction and Repetition, Seven
English Novel, 1982). These critics asserted that deconstruction would find
a voice and an established place in America literary theory.
Source: Bressler, Charles E. 1998. Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice.
Prentice Hall. New Jersey.
Prentice Hall. New Jersey.
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