deconstruction

—deconstructionist, adj., n. —deconstructive, adj.

/dee'keuhn struk"sheuhn/, n.

a philosophical and critical movement, starting in the 1960s and esp. applied to the study of literature, that questions all traditional assumptions about the ability of language to represent reality and emphasizes that a text has no stable reference or identification because words essentially only refer to other words and therefore a reader must approach a text by eliminating any metaphysical or ethnocentric assumptions through an active role of defining meaning, sometimes by a reliance on new word construction, etymology, puns, and other word play.

[DE- + CONSTRUCTION]

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Method of philosophical and literary analysis, derived mainly from the work of Jacques Derrida, that questions the fundamental conceptual distinctions, or "oppositions," in Western philosophy through a close examination of the language and logic of philosophical and literary texts.

Such oppositions are characteristically "binary" and "hierarchical," involving a pair of terms in which one member of the pair is assumed to be primary or fundamental, the other secondary or derivative; examples include nature/culture, speech/writing, and mind/body. To "deconstruct" an opposition is to explore the tensions and contradictions between the hierarchical ordering assumed in the text and other aspects of the text's meaning, especially its figurative or performative aspects. The deconstruction "displaces" the opposition by showing that neither term is primary; the opposition is a product, or "construction," of the text rather than something given independently of it. The speech/writing opposition, according to which speech is "present" to the speaker or author and writing "absent," is a manifestation of what Derrida calls the "logocentrism" of Western culture

i.e., the general assumption that there is a realm of "truth" existing prior to and independent of its representation by linguistic signs. In polemical discussions about intellectual trends of the late 20th century, deconstruction was sometimes used pejoratively to suggest nihilism and frivolous skepticism. In popular usage the term has come to mean a critical dismantling of tradition and traditional modes of thought. See also postmodernism; poststructuralism.

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▪ criticism

Introduction

      form of philosophical and literary analysis, derived mainly from work begun in the 1960s by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida (Derrida, Jacques), that questions the fundamental conceptual distinctions, or “oppositions,” in Western philosophy through a close examination of the language and logic of philosophical and literary texts. In the 1970s the term was applied to work by Derrida, Paul de Man, J. Hillis Miller, and Barbara Johnson, among other scholars. In the 1980s it designated more loosely a range of radical theoretical enterprises in diverse areas of the humanities and social sciences, including—in addition to philosophy and literature—law, psychoanalysis, architecture, anthropology, theology, feminism, gay and lesbian studies, political theory, historiography, and film theory. In polemical discussions about intellectual trends of the late 20th-century, deconstruction was sometimes used pejoratively to suggest nihilism and frivolous skepticism. In popular usage the term has come to mean a critical dismantling of tradition and traditional modes of thought.

Deconstruction in philosophy

      The oppositions challenged by deconstruction, which have been inherent in Western philosophy since the time of the ancient Greeks, are characteristically “binary and “hierarchical,” involving a pair of terms in which one member of the pair is assumed to be primary or fundamental, the other secondary or derivative. Examples include nature and culture, speech and writing, mind and body, presence and absence, inside and outside, literal and metaphorical, intelligible and sensible, and form and meaning, among many others. To “deconstruct” an opposition is to explore the tensions and contradictions between the hierarchical ordering assumed (and sometimes explicitly asserted) in the text and other aspects of the text's meaning, especially those that are indirect or implicit or that rely on figurative or performative uses of language. Through this analysis, the opposition is shown to be a product, or “construction,” of the text rather than something given independently of it.

      In the writings of the French Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Rousseau, Jean-Jacques), for example, society and culture are described as corrupting and oppressive forces that gradually develop out of an idyllic “state of nature” in which humans exist in self-sufficient and peaceful isolation from one another. For Rousseau, then, nature is prior to culture. Yet there is another sense in which culture is certainly prior to nature: the idea of nature is a product of culture, and what counts as “nature” or “natural” at any given historical moment will vary depending upon the culture of the time. What this fact shows is not that the terms of the nature/culture opposition should be inverted—that culture is really prior to nature—but rather that the relation between the terms is not one-sided and unidirectional, as Rousseau and others had assumed. The point of the deconstructive analysis is to restructure, or “displace,” the opposition, not simply to reverse it.

      For Derrida, the most telling and pervasive opposition is the one that treats writing as secondary to or derivative of speech. According to this opposition, speech is a more authentic form of language, because in speech the ideas and intentions of the speaker are immediately “present” (spoken words, in this idealized picture, directly express what the speaker “has in mind”), whereas in writing they are more remote or “absent” from the speaker or author and thus more liable to misunderstanding. As Derrida argues, however, spoken words function as linguistic signs only to the extent that they can be repeated in different contexts, in the absence of the speaker who originally utters them. Speech qualifies as language, in other words, only to the extent that it has characteristics traditionally assigned to writing, such as “absence,” “difference” (from the original context of utterance), and the possibility of misunderstanding. One indication of this fact, according to Derrida, is that descriptions of speech in Western philosophy often rely on examples and metaphors related to writing. In effect, these texts describe speech as a form of writing, even in cases where writing is explicitly claimed to be secondary to speech. As with the opposition between nature and culture, however, the point of the deconstructive analysis is not to show that the terms of the speech/writing opposition should be inverted—that writing is really prior to speech—nor is it to show that there are no differences between speech and writing. Rather, it is to displace the opposition so as to show that neither term is primary. For Derrida, speech and writing are both forms of a more generalized “arche-writing” (archi-écriture), which encompasses not only all of natural language but any system of representation whatsoever.

      The “privileging” of speech over writing is based on what Derrida considers a distorted (though very pervasive) picture of meaning in natural language, one that identifies the meanings of words with certain ideas or intentions in the mind of the speaker or author. Derrida's argument against this picture is an extension of an insight by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (Saussure, Ferdinand de). For Saussure, the concepts we associate with linguistic signs (their “meanings”) are only arbitrarily related to reality, in the sense that the ways in which they divide and group the world are not natural or necessary, reflecting objectively existing categories, but variable (in principle) from language to language. Hence, meanings can be adequately understood only with reference to the specific contrasts and differences they display with other, related meanings. For Derrida, similarly, linguistic meaning is determined by the “play” of differences between words—a play that is “limitless,” “infinite,” and “indefinite”—and not by an original idea or intention existing prior to and outside language. Derrida coined the term différance, meaning both a difference and an act of deferring, to characterize the way in which meaning is created through the play of differences between words. Because the meaning of a word is always a function of contrasts with the meanings of other words, and because the meanings of those words are in turn dependent on contrasts with the meanings of still other words (and so on), it follows that the meaning of a word is not something that is fully present to us; it is endlessly deferred in an infinitely long chain of meanings, each of which contains the “traces” of the meanings on which it depends.

      Derrida contends that the opposition between speech and writing is a manifestation of the “logocentrism” of Western culture—i.e., the general assumption that there is a realm of “truth” existing prior to and independent of its representation by linguistic signs. Logocentrism encourages us to treat linguistic signs as distinct from and inessential to the phenomena they represent, rather than as inextricably bound up with them. The logocentric conception of truth and reality as existing outside language derives in turn from a deep-seated prejudice in Western philosophy, which Derrida characterizes as the “metaphysics of presence.” This is the tendency to conceive fundamental philosophical concepts such as truth, reality, and being in terms of ideas such as presence, essence, identity, and origin—and in the process to ignore the crucial role of absence and difference.

Deconstruction in literary studies

      Deconstruction's reception was coloured by its intellectual predecessors, most notably structuralism and New Criticism. Beginning in France in the 1950s, the structuralist movement in anthropology analyzed various cultural phenomena as general systems of “signs” and attempted to develop “metalanguages” of terms and concepts in which the different sign systems could be described. Structuralist methods were soon applied to other areas of the social sciences and humanities, including literary studies. Deconstruction offered a powerful critique of the possibility of creating detached, scientific metalanguages and was thus categorized (along with kindred efforts) as “post-structuralist.” Anglo-American New Criticism sought to understand verbal works of art (especially poetry) as complex constructions made up of different and contrasting levels of literal and nonliteral meanings, and it emphasized the role of paradox and irony in these artifacts. Deconstructive readings, in contrast, treated works of art not as the harmonious fusion of literal and figurative meanings but as instances of the intractable conflicts between meanings of different types. They generally examined the individual work not as a self-contained artifact but as a product of relations with other texts or discourses, literary and nonliterary. Finally, these readings placed special emphasis on the ways in which the works themselves offered implicit critiques of the categories that critics used to analyze them. In the United States in the 1970s and '80s, deconstruction played a major role in the animation and transformation of literary studies by literary theory (often referred to simply as “theory”), which was concerned with questions about the nature of language, the production of meaning, and the relationship between literature and the numerous discourses that structure human experience and its histories.

Deconstruction in the social sciences and the arts

      Deconstruction's influence widened to include a variety of other disciplines. In psychoanalysis, deconstructive readings of texts by Sigmund Freud (Freud, Sigmund) and others drew attention to the role of language in the formation of the psyche; showed how psychoanalytic case studies are shaped by the kinds of psychic mechanisms that they purport to analyze (thus, Freud's writings are themselves organized by processes of repression, condensation, and displacement); and questioned the logocentric presuppositions of psychoanalytic theory. Some strands of feminist (feminism) thinking engaged in a deconstruction of the opposition between “man” and “woman” and critiqued essentialist notions of gender and sexual identity. The work of Judith Butler, for example, challenged the claim that feminist politics requires a distinct identity for women. Arguing that identity is the product or result of action rather than the source of it, they embraced a performative concept of 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 was influential in gay and lesbian studies, or “queer theory,” as the academic avant-garde linked to movements of gay liberation styled itself.

      In the United States, the Critical Legal Studies movement applied deconstruction to legal writing in an effort to reveal conflicts between principles and counterprinciples in legal theory. The movement explored fundamental oppositions such as public and private, essence and accident, and substance and form. In anthropology, deconstruction contributed to an increased awareness of the role that anthropological field-workers play in shaping, rather than merely describing, the situations they report on and to a greater concern about the discipline's historical connections to colonialism.

      Finally, the influence of deconstruction spread beyond the humanities and social sciences to the arts and architecture. Combining deconstruction's interest in tension and oppositions with the design vocabulary of Russian constructivism, deconstructivist architects such as Frank Gehry challenged the functionalist aesthetic of modern architecture through designs using radical geometries, irregular forms, and complex, dynamic constructions.

Influence and criticism

      In all the fields it influenced, deconstruction called attention to rhetorical and performative aspects of language use, and it encouraged scholars to consider not merely what a text says but rather on the relationship—and potential conflict—between what a text says and what it “does.” In various disciplines, deconstruction also prompted an exploration of fundamental oppositions and critical terms and a reexamination of ultimate goals. Most generally, deconstruction joined with other strands of poststructural and postmodern thinking to inspire a suspicion of established intellectual categories and a skepticism about the possibility of objectivity. Consequently, its diffusion was met with a sizeable body of opposition. Some philosophers, especially those in the Anglo-American tradition, dismissed it as obscurantist wordplay whose major claims, when intelligible, were either trivial or false. Others accused it of being ahistorical and apolitical. Still others regarded it as a nihilistic endorsement of radical epistemic relativism. Despite such attacks, deconstruction has had an enormous impact on a variety of intellectual enterprises.

Additional Reading

Works by Derrida

Among writings by Jacques Derrida, the most accessible to a general reader are the interviews in Positions, trans. by Alan Bass (1981; originally published in French, 1972), and Points …: Interviews, 1974–1994, ed. by Elisabeth Weber (1995; originally published in French, 1992). A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. by Peggy Kamuf (1991), contains representative selections with introductory commentary. For discussions of literary works, see especially Acts of Literature, ed. by Derek Attridge (1992), which contains many key essays and a very important interview not reprinted in Points. Limited Inc (1988) is a polemical exchange with the American philosopher John Searle about the theory of speech acts; the volume includes an afterword, “Toward an Ethic of Discussion,” that is a very accessible treatment of Derrida's position on many contemporary theoretical issues. Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (1994; originally published in French, 1993) is a deconstructive treatment of the legacy of Marxism.

General studies of deconstruction

A systematic introduction is Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (1982, reissued 1994). Christopher Norris, Deconstruction: Theory and Practice, rev. ed. (1991) is an accessible collection of essays. Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (1993; originally published in French, 1991), is a lucid and systematic account of Derrida's thought.Useful accounts of deconstruction and its impact include Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer (eds.), Rhetoric and Form: Deconstruction at Yale (1985); and Anselm Haverkamp (ed.), Deconstruction Is/in America (1995), a collection of essays by distinguished practitioners.

Deconstruction in literary studies

For deconstructive analyses of literature, see the exemplary and succinct essays in Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference (1980, reissued 1985), and A World of Difference (1987, reissued 1989). J. Hillis Miller, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (1982), The Linguistic Moment: From Wordsworth to Stevens (1985, reprinted 1987), and The Ethics of Reading (1987), provide a wide range of accessible interpretations. The most advanced and difficult analyses appear in Paul de Man in Allegories of Reading (1979), and in The Aesthetic Ideology, ed. by Andrzej Warminski (1996), which discusses theoretical texts.

Deconstruction in the social sciences and the arts

Deconstructive treatments of psychoanalysis appear in Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1987; originally published in French, 1980); and Samuel Weber, The Legend of Freud (1982; originally published in German, 1979). Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), is an extremely influential deconstructive study in feminist theory, containing much that helped to initiate queer theory. On queer theory itself see Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (1994). Diane Elam, Feminism and Deconstruction: Ms. en Abyme (1994) is a lucid exploration of deconstruction's relationship to feminism.For deconstruction and the law, see “Deconstruction and the Law,” in Jonathan Culler, Framing the Sign: Criticism and its Institutions (1988), pp. 139–152; Mark Kelman, A Guide to Critical Legal Studies (1987); and Clare Dalton, “An Essay in the Deconstruction of Contract Doctrine,” The Yale Law Journal 94(5): 997–1114 (April 1985). Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson (eds.), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (1992), is a voluminous collection with essays by leading legal scholars, philosophers, and critics.Studies in other areas include Mark C. Taylor, Deconstructing Theology (1982); Peter Brunette and David Wills (eds.), Deconstruction and the Visual Arts: Art, Media, Architecture (1994); Ann Game, Undoing the Social: Towards a Deconstructive Sociology (1991); and Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse (1978, reprinted 1986), on the figurative structure of historical explanation. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, The Post-Colonial Critic, ed. by Sarah Harasym (1993), a collection of interviews with the author; and a difficult work by Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (1994), discuss the impact of deconstructive thinking in postcolonial studies.

Influence and criticism

John M. Ellis, Against Deconstruction (1989), is a vigorous critique; and Simon Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction, 2nd ed. (1999), attempts to counter the notion that deconstruction is a species of textual nihilism.

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