post-structuralism / deconstruction

deconstruction

A branch of poststructuralism and an analytic procedure developed by Jacques Derrida that became a methodology used by literary theorists and critics.

Deconstruction involves the process of analyzing and dismantling texts in order to reveal their inconsistences and inner contradictions.

how does deconstruction work?

by way of ‘inversion’ and ‘reinscription’.

Critics locate a conceptual opposition (e.g. nature/culture) and invert it by showing how the secondary term is indispensable to the primary term. Then, they destabilize and transform – deconstruct – the usual understanding of the concepts, especially their hierarchical relations

post-structuralism

A theoretical and critical movement that supports that there are no fixed reference points in the world – instead, we live in a universe of radical uncertainty – as a result of the instability of language itself.

It problematizes the notion of linguistic referentiality, the notion of essentialism, the decentering of the ‘subject’, the rejection of ‘reason’ as universal, and emphasizes the notion of difference. Post-structuralism played a significant role in shaping the direction of other schools and movements, including postcolonial theory and queer theory.  

similarity between structuralism and post-structuralism

Post-structuralism supports, akin to structuralism, that language is the key to our understanding of ourselves and the world

differences between structuralism and post-structuralism

Post-structuralist thinkers radically question the structuralists’ faith in language.

• Structuralism applied linguistic insights to culture and literature, especially underscoring the idea of an underlying structure and the principle of differentiality and binary oppositions.

• However, while structuralism knows that there is no natural link between the word and that which it refers to, it does not examine the consequences of that gap between language and the world.

• Post-structuralism and deconstruction as a practice break these structures apart.

ho do (post-) structuralism break these structures apart?

1. By exploring how language is unreliable, full of paradoxes which lead to dead ends in communication

2. By breaking down the center or the organizing principle of each structure which imposes hierarchies

post-structuralism: early phases Roland Barthes

• Asserts the independence of the literary text and the impossibility of rendering it unified or limited by anything that the author might have intended. Promotes a radical textual independence: since the work is not determined by intention or context - it is free of all such constraints - it retains the possibility of infinite meanings. The corollary of the death of the author is the birth of the reader.

• This phase seems to license the endless free play of meanings and the escape from all forms of textual authority.

Derrida & Deconstruction (signifier-signified)

• Because the signifier (word) is disconnected from the signified (concept), language floats or slides in relation to reality. Derrida calls this a set of ‘floating signifiers’.

• This ‘sliding’ is further enhanced through figurative language (eg metaphors or metonymies).

• In addition, additional sliding takes place through intertextuality, a text’s reference to prior words, concepts, connotations, conventions, practices and texts.

• Therefore, textual meaning is undecidable. The linguistic, rhetorical and intertextual properties of language undermine or deconstruct stable meaning.

Derrida - Differance

• Meanings are produced with the help of difference and do not derive from the world they refer to.

• Also, words are never stable and fixed in time. Instead, meaning is always subject to the process of deferral. Words depend on the words that preceded them and their meaning is modified by what follows. Meaning is thus  is postponed through an infinite chain of signifiers.

• Derrida captures this through the term différance that contains both the idea of difference and the process of deferral of meaning.

• Différance is a misspelling of différence, which in French the verb differer means both to differ and to defer.

centres and margins (deconstruction)

• exts set up centres of meaning to give themselves stability.

• If there is a centre, there is also a margin. So setting up a centre automatically creates a hierarchal structure.

• Deconstruction brings to light the tension between the central and the marginal in the text.

• These hierarchies (centre/margin) take the form of binary oppositions. Often these oppositions are implicit or even one of the terms is explicitly mentioned, thus this explicit mention evokes the absent term.

• Deconstruction sets out to deconstruct these binary oppositions, as they can be tied up with negative stereotyping, repression, discrimination and social injustice.

practise of deconstruction

• dismantle the cover-ups that texts use to create the semblance of stable meaning: their attempt to create ‘privileged’ centres – implicit or explicit binary oppositions – with the help of rhetorical means.

• Deconstruction shows that a text never achieves closure, there is no final meaning, the text remains a field of possibilities.

aporia (deconstruction)

• It also shows that texts are a product of differences, mediations, and aporias.

• Aporia: it denotes an impasse, a kind of knot in the text that cannot be unraveled because what is said is self-contradictory.

“Structure, sign and play in the discourses of the human sciences”

• A critique of structurality, a critique of the idea of anything that has a centre which is at the same time an enabling causal principle.

• The role of the centre is to orient, balance and organize the structure, but also limit the “freeplay” of the structure.

• The history of the concept of structure is a series of substitutions of center for center. Also, the determination of being as presence.

• The ‘event’: the decentering of norms or centres.

• Language bears within itself the necessity of its own critique.

post-structuralist critics

• They read the text against itself, to understand the textual subconscious (look for meanings directly contrary to their surface meaning)

• They look for shifts, breaks, and aporias of various kinds in the text and see these as evidence of what is repressed in silence by the text (Bertens)

• They seek to show that the text is characterised by disunity rather than unity.

• They show that it is impossible to sustain a univocal meaning in a text – language explodes into multiplicity of meanings