deconstruction

deconstruction in linguistics, philosophy, and literary theory, the exposure and undermining of the metaphysical assumptions involved in systematic attempts to ground knowledge, especially in academic disciplines such as structuralism and semiotics . The term "deconstruction" was coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in the 1960s. In general, deconstruction is a philosophy of meaning, which deals with the ways that meaning is constructed by writers, texts, and readers.

Extending the philosophical excursions of Nietzsche and Heidegger , Derrida criticized the entire tradition of Western philosophy's search to discover the essential structure of knowledge and reality, ultimately confronting the limits of human thought. As an extension of his theory of logocentrism, Derrida posited that all texts are based on hierarchical dualisms (e.g., being/nonbeing, reality/appearance, male/female), where the first element is regarded as stronger and thus essentially true and that all systems of thought have an assumed center, or Archimedean point, upon which they are based. In a deconstructionist reading, this unconscious and unarticulated point is revealed, and in this revelation the binary structure upon which the text rests is imploded. Thus what appears stable and logical is revealed to be illogical and paradoxical, and interpretation is by its very nature misinterpretation.

To a deconstructionist, meaning includes what is left out of the text or ignored or silenced by it. Because deconstruction is an attack on the very existence of theories and conceptual systems, its exposition by Derrida and others purposely resists logical definitions and explanations, opting instead for alinear presentations based on extensive wordplay and puns. Deconstructionists tend to concentrate on close readings of particular texts, focusing on how these texts refer to other texts. Certain scholars have severely criticized this movement on this basic point.

Nevertheless, deconstruction, especially as articulated in Derrida's writings and as promoted by Paul de Man and others, has had a profound effect on many fields of knowledge in American universities, particularly during the 1970s and 80s. In addition to philosophy and literary theory, the techniques and ideas of deconstruction have been employed by scholars in history, sociology, educational theory, linguistics, art, and architecture. While the theory has lost much of its intellectual currency, the general acceptance and popularity of interdisciplinary scholarship in the 1980s and 90s are regarded by many as an outgrowth of deconstruction.

Bibliography: See J. Culler, On Deconstruction (1982); R. Gasche, The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection (1986); P. Kamuf, A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds (1991).

deconstruction, an approach to the reading of literary and philosophical texts that casts doubt upon the possibility of finding in them a definitive meaning, and traces instead the multiplication (or ‘dissemination’) of possible meanings. A deconstructive reading of a poem, for instance, will conclude not with the discovery of its essential meaning, but with an impasse (‘aporia’) at which there are no grounds for choosing between two radically incompatible interpretations. According to deconstruction, literary texts resist any process of interpretation that would fix their meanings, appearing to ‘undo’ themselves as we try to tie them up.

The basis for this apparently perverse approach to reading lies in a certain view of the philosophy of language, and specifically of the status of writing, as developed since 1966 by the French philosopher Derrida, and by his American followers at Yale and elsewhere, including de Man. On this view, derived from a critical reassessment of Saussure, meaning can never be fully ‘present’ in language, but is always deferred endlessly–as when one may look up a word in a dictionary, only to be given other words, and so on ad infinitum. While speech gives the illusion of a fixed origin–the presence of the speaker–that can guarantee the meaning of an utterance, writing is more clearly unauthenticated and open to unlicensed interpretation. Derrida's alarmingly simplified account of the history of Western philosophy since Plato proposes that the dominant metaphysical tradition, in its deep suspicion of writing, has repeatedly tried to erect a fixed point of reference (a ‘transcendental signified’ such as God, Reason, absolute truth, etc.) outside the promiscuous circulation of signifiers, one that could hold in place a determinate system of truths and meanings.

The project of deconstruction, then, is not to destroy but to unpick or dismantle such illusory systems, often by showing how their major categories are unstable or contaminated by their supposed opposites. In philosophical terms, deconstruction is a form of relativist scepticism in the tradition of Nietzsche. Its literary implications are partly compatible with the New Criticism's rejection of the ‘intentional fallacy’ or any notion of the author fixing a text's meanings (see also death of the author), as they are with New Critical interest in paradox as a feature of poetry; but they go further in challenging the claims of any critical system to possess ‘the meaning’ of a literary (or any other) work. In some forms of deconstruction, notably that of de Man, literary texts are held to be more honest than other writings, because they openly delight in the instabilities of language and meaning, through their use of figurative language, for instance. The deconstructive style of literary analysis commonly emphasizes this through puns and wordplay of its own. See also structuralism and post-structuralism.

deconstruction Key term in literary criticism, pioneered by the work of the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930– ). Patterns of opposition, which form a given text, are broken down and considered. Derrida's key writings include Writing and Difference (1967) and Dissemination (1972). The process of deconstruction is highly text-centred, and its critics claim it excludes the role of history in literary work. In architecture, the term is used to describe work dating from the early 1980s that explored ways of reconciling traditional oppositions in building design, such as structure-decoration and abstraction-figuration.