Deconstruction Research Paper

1. Deconstruction And Philosophy

Deconstruction undertakes a radical critique of fundamental categories of Western thought by exploring how these categories have been constructed in and by the discourses that rely on them. It is a mode of analysis that examines not only the arguments of philosophical texts but also the rhetorical procedures and devices they employ and the tensions or contra-dictions between what is claimed or assumed and what the texts themselves must do in order to support such claims. A major focus of deconstruction has been the traditional binary oppositions that have structured Western thought since the time of the Greeks: for example, the oppositions between inside and outside, mind and body, literal and metaphorical, speech and writing, presence and absence, nature and culture, intelligible and sensible, form and meaning. Each of these oppositions is hierarchical, in the sense that one of its terms has been taken to be primary and fundamental, and the other secondary and derivative (Derrida 1981). Thus, nature is logically prior to culture; writing is seen as merely a way of representing speech, which is taken to be the basic form of language; meaning is what comes first and is then given expression by form.

A deconstruction of these oppositions asks how the philosophical enterprise and thought in general have relied upon the privileging of one term and invites us to consider whether in fact such hierarchies should not be revised. In particular, a deconstruction questions these hierarchical oppositions by showing how they have been constructed and, in the process, undoing that construction and establishing a new relation between the terms. It can be shown, for example, that the idea of ‘nature’ is a product of culture: conceiving something as prior to culture is a specific cultural operation whose import and function needs to be assessed. In the opposition between nature and culture, the primacy of nature cannot, therefore, be taken for granted. What we have, rather, is an opposition elaborated within culture; what counts as nature in any historical moment will be a fact about that culture. To argue in this way is to invert and restructure the opposition (to ‘displace’ it) in a way characteristic of deconstruction. Instead of a primary nature and a secondary culture, we discover a variable distinction between nature and culture within culture.

For Derrida, the most telling and pervasive opposition has been the one that treats writing as secondary or derivative with respect to speech. According to this opposition, in speech the ideas and intentions of the speaker are immediately present; it is a direct and authentic form of language, whereas writing is merely a graphic representation of the spoken word (a sign of a sign) and hence marked by absence and possibilities of discrepancies between form and meaning. (Derrida 1976). By setting aside writing as a secondary and derivative, a mere representation open to misunderstanding, accounts of language have taken as their object an idealized form of speech, where the linguistic form is a direct expression of what the speaker, as we say, ‘has in mind.’ But Derrida argues that linguistic forms can function as signs only to the extent that they can be repeated in different contexts, in the absence of any particular speaker’s presence or intention (Derrida 1988). Speech is only possible, in other words, to the extent that it has the qualities assigned to writing, such as absence, difference, and the possibility of misunderstanding. One mark of this, Derrida has shown, is the frequent recourse, in attempts to describe speech, of examples and metaphors drawn from writing. In effect, speech has been described as a form of writing, even when the claim has been that writing is derivative from speech (Derrida 1976). This deconstruction of the traditional hierarchical opposition between speech and writing argues not that there are no differences between speech and writing but that the traditional opposition is untenable and that both speech and writing are forms of a general writing (archiecriture), which is the condition of possibility for any system of representation whatsoever.

Derrida argues that treating writing as secondary to speech is part of what he calls the ‘logo-centrism’ of Western culture: the presumption of an order of truth or thought prior to its representation by signs (Derrida 1976). Logocentrism tries to treat representation as inessential rather inextricably involved in the structure of phenomena, but an attentive reading of the texts of the philosophical tradition shows that they tell a different story. Derrida’s work attempts to demonstrate that discourses that treat writing as secondary in fact must make use of notions linked to writing when they characterize speech and that thus speech can be seen as a version of a generalized writing, which is the condition of language and thought in general. This is an instance of the deconstruction of concepts seen as fundamental, such as ‘presence,’ ‘truth,’ ‘origin,’ and ‘identity.’

Deconstruction may be conceived in the first instance as a critique of Western philosophy. Philosophy, Derrida argues, has been founded on a theory of ‘presence,’ in which such notions as truth, being, and reality are determined in relation to an ontological center, essence, or origin, based on the repression of absence and difference. But since deconstruction works not by erecting an alternative theory but by exploring how philosophical discourses have produced their concepts through rhetorical stratagems, deconstruction was welcomed by some students and teachers of literature as a powerful practice of reading which would illuminate how texts—whether philosophical or literary—implicitly put in question what they explicitly maintain or what they appear to assume. Barbara Johnson, a leading US practitioner, calls deconstruction ‘a careful teasing out of warring forces of signification within a text’ (Johnson 1980, p.5).

2. Deconstruction And Literary Studies

In the 1970s and 1980s deconstruction played a major role in the animation and transformation of literary studies by what was called simply ‘theory,’ for short. Briefly stated, ‘theory’ is concerned with questions about the nature of language, the production of meaning, or the relations between literature and the numerous discourses that structure human experience and its histories. In the USA, deconstruction was associated in particular with a group of scholars at Yale University, where Derrida taught regularly as a visiting professor. In the hands of Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, and Barbara Johnson, for instance, deconstruction became a powerful practice of rhetorical reading, attentive to what is at stake in texts of all sorts and to how texts engage those stakes.

Deconstructive literary criticism was often com-pared, especially by its critics, to an earlier Anglo-American New Criticism, which sought to explicate and appreciate verbal works of art as complex constructions and emphasized the role of paradox and irony in these complex artifacts. However, deconstructive readings, by critics such as those mentioned above, differ in several ways (Culler 1982). They treat works of art not as the harmonious fusion of form and content but as instances of the intractable conflicts between modes of meaning. They generally examine the individual work not as a self-contained artifact but a product of relations with other texts or discourses, literary and nonliterary. Finally, they are especially interested in the ways in which the works may offer implicit critiques of the categories critics use to analyze them.

3. Deconstruction Beyond Philosophy And Literature

Critics of deconstruction have tended to attack it either as obscurantist wordplay, excessively invested in supposedly minor or marginal rhetorical features of texts and cast in language that obfuscates rather than illuminates, or as a nihilistic denial of authority, certainty, and foundations, for which ‘anything goes’ (Ellis 1989). But despite attacks, the impact of deconstruction on modern thought, not just literary studies, has been extensive. Most generally, it has encouraged the questioning of the hierarchical oppositions that structure any field of inquiry and an interest in whether and how these fundamental oppositions are subverted by the phenomena that they are used to describe. Deconstruction is thus a powerful version of the general critique of supposedly scientific metalanguages—sets of terms or concepts used to analyze a domain and which are regarded as external to the phenomena they purport to analyze. Deconstructive analyses explore the ways in which the supposedly neutral or purportedly scientific metalanguage is deeply affected by the phenomena it is supposed to analyze. Thus, it might show, for instance, that the terms deployed by theory of metaphor or figurative language generally are themselves scarcely free of metaphor or explore how a psychoanalytic theory is itself affected by the mechanisms of repression and wish-fulfillment it purports to analyze. Since within literary and cultural studies it was above all structuralism which sought to elaborate metalanguages for analyzing cultural phenomena as a series of languages or signifying systems, the deconstructive critique of the possibility of a neutral meta-language was seen as a step beyond structuralism and hence as a case of ‘poststructuralism.’

There are two main aspects to the influence of deconstruction outside of literary and philosophical studies. On the one hand, granting primacy not to what a text ‘says’ but, rather, to how what it ‘does’ relates to what it says, deconstruction emphasizes that rhetorical structures are centrally at work in language of all sorts and that discourse has an important ‘performative’ dimension, structuring experience in particular ways. It thus seconds and invigorates the constructivist tendencies of numerous disciplines: the attempt to show how that the phenomena studied by a discipline are not simply given to experience but are produced by conceptual frameworks and discursive practices. On the other hand, as a critical exploration of fundamental oppositions and an attempt to intervene and alter the value attributed to particular terms, deconstructive thinking has affected not just how texts are read but the sense of what a discipline’s goal might be. In psychoanalysis, for instance, deconstructive readings of texts by Sigmund Freud and such successors as Jacques Lacan, have done several things:

(a) focused on the structuring role of language in the formation of the psyche;

(b) shown how psychoanalytic case studies are themselves structured by the kinds of psychic mechanisms that they purport to analyze (so Freud’s or Lacan’s writings are themselves organized by the processes of repression, condensation, and displacement that they theorize); and

(c) questioned the complicity of psychoanalysis with a logocentrism which believes in originary principles or an ultimate reality (Derrida 1987).

Deconstructive thinking in psychoanalysis may seek not the origin of a trauma but the stakes of a belief in origin.

Some strands of feminist thinking espouse a deconstruction of the opposition between men and women and a critique of essentialist notions of identity. Judith Butler’s (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, for instance, not only challenges the claim that a feminist politics requires an identity for woman (for Butler, identity is the product or result rather than the source of action); it develops a ‘performative’ concept of gender and sexual identity, modeled on the way in which linguistic acts (such as promising) work to bring into being the entities (the promise) to which they refer. This perspective has been influential in the realm of gay and lesbian studies or ‘queer theory,’ as the academic avant-garde linked to movements of gay liberation has styled itself.

In the field of law there has been considerable deconstructive analysis within the movement known as ‘critical legal studies,’ which has focused on conflicts between principles and counterprinciples within the system of legal doctrine. There are critiques of the oppositions such as public vs. private, essence vs. accident, substance vs. form, which are fundamental to the realm of law, and demonstrations that legal doctrine and argument are attempts to paper over contradictions which nonetheless reassert themselves (Kelman 1987). Attacks on critical legal studies, like attacks on deconstruction in philosophy, often accuse it of undermining confidence in a system without offering an alternative model.

Finally, the impact of deconstruction has spread beyond the humanities and social sciences to the field of architecture, where deconstructive architecture has come to mean design that flaunts, often in a parodic way, the elements from which it is constructed.

In its diffusion in the humanities and social sciences, following its greatest moment of fame in the 1970s and 1980s, deconstruction in the broadest sense has be-come a critique of categories taken as natural and a drive to pursue the analysis of the logic of signification in a given area as far as one can, even if the result is disquieting—an exacerbation of questions or problems rather than their resolution. It has thus joined with other strands of postmodern and post-structuralist thinking to inspire suspicion of established categories and canons and skepticism about objectivity. Although opponents of deconstruction have often sought to link its critique of established values to an amoral nihilism, as a critique scientistic pretensions in the humanities and social sciences (among other things) deconstruction has included a strong element of ethical reflection, particularly about the conditions of possibility of ethics or justice (Critchley 1992, Cornell et al. 1992).

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